A (currently theoretical) question concerning a book about the Kolab Server

[Bernhard Reiter]

Am Donnerstag, 10. Juli 2008 13:33:33 schrieb Gunnar Wrobel:
> So I'm wondering if there'd actually be enough financial interest in a
> book about Kolab. This is still a completely hypothetical question as
> I didn't consider the important parameters of such a project yet. I'd
> expect the costs to be somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty
> thousand Euros for convinving the publisher to agree to the model with
> a non-free print version and a free PDF.

There is some interested in documentation,
as you can see from the operating system manual in German available from 
http://kolab.org/documentation.html which a customer of the Kolab-Konsortium
contracted.

(One of the next steps probably would be to translate this nice manual.)
 
> So right now I'm just looking for some comments to start getting some
> ideas and a better grasp of the potential problems that one would need
> to solve.

There are two problems that I see:
a) people just expect the documentation to be there, so it probably will need 
to be cross financed from other Kolab business. While it is commericially 
viable for KK to run a large portions of the Kolab community efforts, the 
level could be better for maintenance and documentation. It will largely 
depend on how good KK will manage to get business and how fair users are 
inclined to pay for good service which includes running infrastructure and 
documentation.

b) Technically a good manual must be changed in the moment the software is 
changed, so it must be part of the software development process. For this the 
documentation must be part of public infrastructure of the kolab.org 
community.

Best,
Bernhard


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