Help Us Improve: SUSE Documentation Survey

Why Documentation?

Documentation is an essential part of any product. For many years now, you hear me repeating this over and over again. There is no product which is so simple to use and maintain, that it doesn’t require any description, introduction or examples. This is especially true for enterprise software which covers many use cases. Most software solutions only become usable thanks to detailed documentation. If you work in an IT department and you are responsible for a functioning environment and smooth processes, missing or poor documentation can impact your daily work and even the success of your business.

What Does Documentation Include?

And technical documentation is not limited to conventional product documentation in the form of guides or manuals. It consists of many different types, categories and channels. Of course, product and solution related information is important. But in addition – and just as a few examples – there are technical information documents delivered by customer care and support departments. There is project documentation provided by consultants. There are reference architecture or software implementation guides delivered by colleagues working with our alliance partners. There is marketing material, such as whitepapers or data sheets, that contain valuable information. There are best practices based on the experience of and delivered by members of our ecosystem. And there are many other forms of documentation, such as training material, videos, podcasts, etc. Documentation makes information easily accessible, helps new users learn quickly, simplifies the product and helps cut administration and support costs.

Help Us Improve!

At SUSE, we are well aware of that. Often enough we get direct feedback from our customers and partners, and from SUSE colleagues working on the implementation of our solutions onsite, how much you rely on documentation to get your tasks done. We try to contribute our part. Thus, as an example, we offered the first Doc Day at SUSECON 2019 – and we plan to repeat that more often. But we’ve reached a point now where we would like to ask for YOUR support! Please help us improve our services. We are heavily interested to learn what information is vital to your usage of our product and solution set and what we could do better in future. To this end, we have prepared an overarching survey about documentation at SUSE. It should not take more than 10 -15 minutes, and some of the questions are optional.

• SUSE Documentation Survey (English)
• SUSE Documentation Survey (Simplified Chinese)
• SUSE Documentation Survey (Japanese)

We call upon you – our SUSE customers, partners, colleagues, users, friends – to share your insight. Your feedback is crucial to understand how you use SUSE documentation, which components you might be missing, and what can be enhanced, to ensure you get the best information and backing for your daily work.

Thank you very much for your support! And by the way – you can also win a giant plush chameleon if you want to participate in the survey’s raffle.

Disclaimer: The text at hand has not been reviewed by a native speaker. If you find typos or language mistakes, please send them to me (meike.chabowski@suse.com) – or if you like them, just keep them and feed them.