Best Tool to Create User Guides

Question

We are planning to create a user guide for internal use only. It's 150-page document in Word for a self-developed SW tool. The user guide will require constant update. No translation is needed. We would like to have - an easy-to-use interface for the tool - easy to update - good functionality on change history control, better to have change history detailed to each functionality of the software.

Do you have a recommendation on the tool?

Answer 1

For internal documentation I've found wikis to be quite useful. A wiki has several useful features for this task:

• built-in change-tracking
• doc can be structured as several pages (e.g. one per major section) for easier management; individual pages can then be edited without any need to merge changes into a master document
• some (most?) wiki platforms detect impending edit conflicts; if someone else has the page open for edit you'll find out (so no messy merges later)
• can be accessed by anybody with a browser, on any device (try reading a Word doc or PDF on your phone...)
• if your wiki keeps a "recent changes" page, work is visible and thus more likely to receive additional helpful edits or comments (more collaboration)

It does have some disadvantages -- you have to run a server, and printing isn't very practical. If you ever decided to publish the documentation to a wider audience you'd need to port it to something. But, that said, you could probably script most of that.

Answer 2

In the past, I've used a wiki for this type of work. However, a tool doesn't organize itself. The best wiki sites are heavily edited from every level from copy to development.

Answer 3

Would GoogleDocs work? We used them extensively at my prior workplace (a university), as everyone had a google account that was the campus email account, and it has good version tracking.

Like any shared document, usually you need someone somewhat in charge who will care if parts aren't updated and they should be, and to make sure the ToC/index is current.

Alas, at my current workplace, Gmail and GDocs aren't allowed. Nor is much innovation in general, so we don't have always-updating multi-user documents (at least in the departments I've interacted with.)