User Poll - How do you prefer to access Collanos Workplace's Help section?

[Gil Heiman]

We are in the process of redesigning our Help section and need to know how our users actually use it. With your answers we may be able to reduce the size of the installation and provide users with a more accurate and relevant content.
Thanks,
The Collanos Team

[MikeA]

I can answer this one right now! We are having a problem syncing. I tried to get help and the help keeps getting timed out. Local docs are a necessity!!!

Mike

[Gil Heiman]

Currently Help is installed with the application so there should be complete offline access to it via Help>Help Contents.

Is this being timed out or the help available on our web site?

[wonder_trout]

Wouldn't it make more sense to have it as a local copy but use the inbuilt replication to keep the documentation up to date? ... And also include 'common issues' type content that arises between major releases? After all, that's what this type of architecture is supposedly good for

[Gil Heiman]

Collanos is great for replicating content for teams of up to 15 members. However, one-to-many (over 15 users) requires sending new content to every single member. From a communications standpoint this is not very efficient.

For this purpose we are using this User Forum to post all release notes and generate correspondeces between the thousands of Collanos members.

As you all noticed, Collanos does require a large download so we are trying to reduce it in size wherever we can, which is why we are trying to move much of the Help section to the web.

[gwashburn]

You could use the replication with help files like bittorrent does feeds. By default a new install will connect to relay server and register itself as needing help files. You could have a default workspace that can handle up to 15 new installs and all others get queued in list. Your default workspace can then feed as many as it can. New installs that already have all current help files will select from list of queued installs that need help files based on best ping and then spawn the help files out. Once they have spawned a full set of help files once, you set a flag that they now only spawn changes. This way new installs that have just been installed and are not actively syncing workspaces yet, will spawn complete sets of help files, but then only changes to the help files going forward. New changes can be spawned from a separate default workspace and then the updated installs feed the others queued. Basically once you get one install updated then it will virally take care of all others and get faster and faster as more nodes help out. If it is based on a fastest ping time then no one install is slowed down. This would require using a standard FPS Multiplayer Game type list of active nodes and ping times, some flags, and an opt out in preferences for those that are not community oriented hee hee

Everyone stays up to date and the replication engine can be used.