If it is not excessively expensive, the new version of your program should read data files created with previous versions, your newest 10Gbit switch should talk to the 100Mbit legacy one etc.
People seem to forget that this should also apply to your website with product documentation.
I have a nice Cerberus Pentagram P6381-0 wireless router that usually works perfectly. Today, however, I had a power glitch that left the router in unusable state.
I managed to get to the vendor's site with documentation, but the closest model I could get the PDF for was P6381-2 (can you spot the difference? ;-))
I managed to reset the router to factory settings using that doco - but surprise, surprise: the default password does not work.
Almost an hour later I googled for the exact model number and I found the right manual on the very same site - it just was not linked in the support links section. If it was, it would have spared me 2 hours of looking for the problem.
And yes, the default passwords are different for P6381-0 and P6381-2 models.
Lesson learned: keep the documentation for older releases easily findable for as long as you have people using it.
This applies esp to products that are not likely to be upgraded as soon as you release the new version: either because it is a piece of hardware or when upgrade costs money or significant effort.
1 comments:
It could be just a mistake. It happens very often on big sites and reporting broken links and missing docs can only help.
Post a Comment