John,
there are many roads that lead to Rome.
Wikis are quite nice. On my last project we had a
multi-tier application. The Unix folks had their doco
in their own wiki. We zOS folks had our stuff in
simple Word documents and spreadsheets.
Which is the better solution I don't know, though
I know very well where my personal preference goes.
But that's mainly a matter of familiarity.
One question comes to mind, though.
How does your management look upon documenation?
Does your company have any standards?
Are they enforced? Are products and/or changes
allowed to go to prod *without* required doco
changes?
I guess it's the usual story. It makes me feel sad.
There's never time to create or maintain decent
documentation - and when someone needs to
apply maintenance mgt complains it takes too much
time. Hey - what do you expect?
Would you buy a car that has no manual, no
maintenance directions, no nothing?
So it's too cumbersome and too expensive and then
some mgr decides its 'much better' to replace the
system with (whatever).
The return on investment is a hopeless issue;
expect the new system to suffer from the same
problems.
Engineers and scientists make mistakes, which
can be costly. But at least we learn from our
mistakes. It's time managers start doing the same.
Managers should be held responsible for their
decisions. Even after they leave to another
department. I've seen to many of them hopping
around so often, they never get to see the actual
results of their own decisions. And boards let
them get away with it. Its incredible.
Well, that's it, I guess. Don't let it spoil your weekend.
Cheers,
Abe.
===
----- Original Message -----
From: "John McKown" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 2:30 PM
Subject: Philosophy: curiousity question
I am curious about something. It is not directly about IBM z series, but
about those of us, older, people who support them. It is more a
philosophy question than technical.
I want to document our system. We do have some documentation. At
present, it is all is a mish-mash of various MS Word documents. I really
don't care much for it. And I'll admit one reason is that I dislike Word
Processors in general and MS Word in particular. Anyway, I have access
to a Windows server system. On it, I installed a nice little package
called UniServer.
http://www.uniformserver.com/
<quote>
The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on
any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or
move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server.
Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made
with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server.
</quote>
On top of this I installed a very simple Wiki: http://www.pmwiki.org/
I have written a fair number of hyperlinked "articles" about our system
using this. Granted, it is a bit of a bother to have to type stuff in.
But no worse than typing in any other system. I've tried to include
links to vendor support sites and how we use the product. For products
which I've installed, I've included installation and customization
information.
Now the "problem". Nobody else will even consider using this for their
documentation. They have said that it is just too different from MS Word
and even though they like what __I've__ done with the links, it is "just
too much trouble" to learn to do documentation in a different way. And,
anyway, MS Word is universal whereas Wikis are not. So learning to
maintain a Wiki article is not marketable.
Am I insane to want to use a Wiki for this sort of thing __instead__ of
a Word processor?
I'm not even going into other software I use. Such as vym (View Your
Mind) which I used to document the IPL and which made a very nice
graphic image for the Wiki. This image shows the IPL sequence and
CA-OPS/MVS processing which results in everything coming up without the
need to enter a lot of z/OS console commands. Again, others think the
graph is nice and very useful. But don't want to learn how to make one
themselves. OK, I can understand this latter because vym is a Linux
application. And nobody else likes or uses a Linux desktop. <sigh>
Yes, I will have some cheese with that whine.
--
John McKown
Maranatha! <><
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