Computing Services Establishes Help Project Team

From Cursor, the Computing Services newsletter, Carnegie Mellon University, January, 1994.

Mike Meyer, Computing Services and Department of Statistics

Computing Services has established a Help System Project team to review the Andrew help system and to implement improvements. There are three major reasons to revamp the help system: First, currently supported help delivery systems, such as ATK help, are limited to ATK documents and manual pages. Second, and more importantly, the help file information is often outdated, and sometimes misleading or irrelevant, while important information is completely missing. Third, the help system does not currently document, nor work on Macintoshes or PCs.

The Help System Project team is addressing these concerns. The team will develop a new online help system that will be accessible from Andrew workstations, Macintoshes, and PCs running Windows. The team will extensively update the basic help information that already exists on Andrew. A system to interact with resources available on internet may also be developed, adapting appropriate data and delivery mechanisms.

The entire system is scheduled for completion by the end of 1994. After that, all files and documents will be reviewed and updated regularly so the help information stays up to date. Feedback will be encouraged and statistics will be kept to show the team what is most useful and accessible in the new system.

The team's major goal is to provide campus network users with more comprehensive online help documentation developed in house and by various vendors. The help system developers hope that the expanded system will keep pace with the growing needs of the network users.

Online publications being planned include:

Cursor, or a similar regular newsletter, reporting Carnegie Mellon computing news
UNIX man pages for all platforms (unedited, but indexed)
General help files written and maintained by the documentation staff
Policy statements, manuals, the Division's Annual Report and general in-house documentation
Application-specific help files and man pages for local and contributed collections on UNIX, and help files for the PC and Macintosh platforms
Regularly updated information on computer store prices, datacommunications information, cluster hours, and so forth

The project team hopes to develop search capabilities for all the documentation, full text, indexed key fields, and hyper-text style links. Users should be able to search for a specific term, browse all documents in a database, and follow paths from a found document to other related documents.

The new help system will provide information about changes in all areas of computing on Andrew. Users will have access to advisor's frequently asked questions and answers, reducing the load on advisor. Updated computer store information will be available on the system, instead of just on bboards.

The Help System Project team wants to know what users need from the help system. Please answer the following questions and send your responses to:
documentation+@andrew.cmu.edu.

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