Stone age thinking in the internet age

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I am a huge fan of accessibility, and convenience for my customers.  In my new role, we have a product that is a little long in tooth, and the software is a bit dated as well.  Working to fix that, but one hangup is our absolutely shitty help system.  

It is web based, and installed on the PC that the software is installed on.  It uses some POS ActiveX control, so it ONLY works with IE (and not IE9).  

Even when you get the right browser, and configuration, it is a lousy format, hard to navigate, and the search/index is terrible.

I want to go to a completely online, standards compliant interface, and always up to date.

But our marketing team, who controls the manuals and the help system generation/maintenance is paranoid that making the help information accessible to all would lead our competitors to find ways to attack us. Words fail me.

F’ me.  You can’t make this shit up.  How backwards is that.  

Swimming upstream here.

About the author

geoffand

1 comment

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  • Rich,Thanks for your feedback. I have been trying many of these arguments, but didn’t think of the Net Promoter scores.I will win this battle, and I was just venting, but I am going to win this.For real: Our current help system uses some really lousy ActiveX control that mandates the use of IE 8 or earlier. Grrrrr. Another pet peeve.Geoff

By geoffand

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