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! <>< ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
