Customised NAV Training and Help Documentation

JodieM

Hi, I would like to know what other NAV developers are doing for preparing customised training and help documentation to assist end users of heavily customised solutions to understand the customised features.

Do you produce
a) customised context sensitive help
b) customised documentation to go with the standard NAV documentation available on CustomerSource and PartnerSource
c) customised face to face instructor lead training courses
d) all of the above
e) none of the above

If you produce any of these documents do you start with the word versions of the standar NAV documentation and then modify them (available only to partners on the Partner Advantage Plan) or do you just start from scratch and create your own?

Do you use any Help Authoring tools like Robo Help and does it work well enough for the Context Sensetive Help?

Do you do face to face formal training courses with your clients? Do you produce a training script or agenda to follow or just go with the flow depending on what questions are asked.

for training on standard NAV modules do you do face to face training or do you just point your clients in the direction eLearning and CustomerSource?

I'm very interested in this topic since the NAV 5 training material produced by MS seems very poor (and mainly for NAV 4 still) and the MS eLearning is very very boring, I would like to know how other people are managing this?

DenSter

What it all comes down to is if creating material like that is in the customer's budget. If the customer requires custom help and customized training material it needs to be written, which of course comes with a budget. I've been involved in projects where they did in fact need to have customized training manuals, and ones that did not think it was worth the cost.

Dave_Cintron

We wrote our own book. See http://www.third-dynamic.com.

JodieM

Thanks for the reply Daniel
Yes the reason I've asked this question is that more clients are now wanting to pay for the customised content.
So let me rephrase the question a bit for others that may want to reply... given that the client is willing to pay for the customised documents and customised training, what is the best way to do it to give them value for money - any ideas?

Thanks

kine

On PartnerSource, some manuals can be downloaded in Word format, which you can "customize"... May be it is good starting point...

JodieM

Thanks for the Reply Kamil
You can only get them in word format if your company is on the Partner Advantage plan which is really quite expensive compared to the Partner Foundation plan...

But the real question is, are those documents really any good. I know they are all we've got, but are they actually good enough. They seem to be good in some areas but overly complex in others and not detailed enough in some areas. It seems that they are more like a help file and tell you what each button or function does, but in some cases they don't give enough real world examples on how things are done.

just my 2c worth.

kine

They cannot be detailed, because the ways how to do things in NAV are too wide and each company will use it in own way. It is why you cannot get more detailed info in the generic manuals and the partners need to customize it for each company...

JodieM

Thanks for the Reply again Kamil, I agree with what you've said.

So that brings me back to my first Question...
As we have to produce custom manuals, what is the best way of doing it and how do others out there do it?

Does everyone just have Partner Advantage plan and modify the word documents of the std NAV manuals, or do you create new documents and reference them back to the NAV manuals?

Interestingly, I found this blog post yesterday that says NAV 6/2009 will have a completely revised help and documentation system http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/archive/2008/ ... s-nav.aspx which sounds great and very promising, so I have also asked them how they are going to set this up so we don't have to re-invent the wheel when the new version comes out.

JodieM

Based on the post on the MDSN forum, I emailed the NAV help team directly. Here is my email to them.

I am currently researching ways to improve our corporate offering for customised help, training and documentation for our clients. We do a lot of major customisations and clients are now wanting to purchase customised documentation from us.

I know that the standard NAV documentation is available in Word format, to modify, but it is only available to the Partners on the Partner Advantage Plan, we are only on the Partner Foundation plan, so the only docs we can access are the base blank template docs.

Being from Australia, we were not able to go to Convergence (although it would have been great to go), and it currently looks like info from the conference is only available to attendees.

So I would like some advice from you.
1) So we don’t have to re-invent the wheel when the next version comes out, can you provide an overview of how the new documentation is created, with what tools, and how we can go about building a similar system now so we can re-utilise it in the next version.
2) Can you provide an overview of the extensibility of the documentation system that you presented in your convergence session?
3) Will your new system involve any integration with eLearning tools and SCORM compliance. I would love to see it be a full e-Learning suite.
4) I’m thinking about making our customised documentation available to our clients via the Sharepoint External Collaboration toolkit, eg sharepoint on our site that our clients have access to. That way if there is ever any updates required, they always have the most up to date version available. Will the new system be compatible with this?
5) In the new system will there be any way that Partners on the Partner Foundation membership can access documentation to customise?
6) Which Help Authoring tool do you recommend to use to produce Context Sensitive Help files for Dyanmics?
7) Is there anything else you can suggest for us to start doing now to improve our systems now and work in with this new system in the near future?
Any help you can give would be appreciated.


I got a reply back today to say that the help team will do a follow up blog post to address these issues because they know others can benefit from this information too.
So put http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/ in your feed reader to keep up to date with the details from the NAV help team.