An Application Deployment

Why is it that vendors insist on developers staying up all night to write installation documentation for a 40 component on 19 server installation? Do they not realize that this is not the best way to have your documentation produced? What about the image that it presents to the customer, or the impact of someone actually following said documentation!

That has been one of my tasks over the last week. I stalling a complex enterprise solution from documentation written at four in the morning by a very tired developer. Needless to say it has been difficult and my copy of the documentation is now full of notes to take back to the vendor. Notes like “What is this?” or “Which config files are you referring to?” and “In the config file I can find, what ’exactly’ do I need to change?”

It does not help that the application is not complete…

We are trying to follow cryptic documentation for an application that is not complete to install two instances with four environments per instance and twenty servers per instance and as many as twenty-five applications per server!

Hmm… Fun.

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