Frequently Asked Questions
Below are frequently asked questions about the standard procedures that Accruent follows for technical documentation:
What types of documents do these standard procedures apply to?
These procedures apply to the product manuals and online help that are intended for Accruent customers and partners. They do not apply to marketing, sales, administrative, or other document types created by Accruent. Information that applies to all use cases for which the products were designed and for all supported versions can be found in the product manuals. Rare or obscure use cases and version-dependent solutions can often be found in the online Meridian knowledge base or in the Release Notes of the affected product.
Why doesn’t your documentation have the answer that I’m looking for?
Have you looked for the answer to your question in the latest version of the documentation even if it’s for a software version newer than what you’re using? We continually improve the latest version of the documentation but we do not copy all those improvements into previous versions. This is the same standard procedure that we follow for our software. We fix bugs in the latest release but we don’t always fix them in older versions. Sometimes, we do provide fixes for critical bugs in older software versions. We do the same for our documentation. Always check the latest version of our documentation for the best information.
If your answer isn’t in even the latest documentation, we recommend that you discuss it with your Accruent partner or Accruent Technical Support so that we can better understand your need. Many documentation improvements are made as a result of those discussions.
Why can’t I find what I’m looking for?
It might be that you’re looking for higher level answer than our documentation typically provides. Each topic (heading) in our documentation typically describes a single task or function. This keeps the topics short, easy to read, and able to be referenced from, rather than repeated in, related topics. But if you’re looking for how to use a group of tasks or functions to achieve a particular result or business problem, you may not find the “big picture” outlined in our documentation. Notable exceptions are our installation and configuration checklists that provide helpful overviews when you need to perform multiple tasks. We also recommend that you look at the Accruent Academy. The training there focuses more on helping you to see the bigger picture.
We work hard at making information findable in our documentation. If you search for specific keywords but don’t find the information you need but you can find the correct topics by other means, we want to know about it so that we can investigate and possibly make changes to improve your results. Please submit the specifics of your case (and any other product improvement ideas) to our Ideas database where you can also vote for ideas submitted by others.
Why doesn’t every VBScript API object, event, and function have complete code samples?
Our technical writers write code too and they like great examples as much as you. Unfortunately, writing, testing, and maintaining great code samples is as much work as building an entire working program. Our primary mission is to help as many kinds of users as we can to be successful in as many use cases as we can and to do it as best we can. Programmers that use our APIs are a small minority and often have very special needs that we cannot anticipate with code samples. If you need help using our APIs, please contact your Accruent partner or Accruent Technical Support and we’ll be glad to give you personalized support. Our online customer community is also a good forum to exchange tips, ideas, and knowledge about customizing our products.
Why don’t you include more screen shots, newer screen shots, or videos?
We agree that a picture is worth a thousand words but usually a picture costs more make than it does to write a hundred words. High quality screen shots and videos are very time consuming to produce and maintain correctly and consistently. Issues with: image formats, display and print resolutions, evolving operating systems, evolving product versions, user interface text changes, custom configurations, ease of localization, relevant sample data, privacy & security, and third-party trademarks are just some of the reasons that make screen shots and videos expensive to maintain. We believe that you would prefer more and better text over low quality images so long as the text gives you the answers that you need. In return, we prefer to invest our resources into making better products that don’t require screen shots to understand and that require less explanation with text.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. We do include screen shots whenever our user interface is particularly complicated or non-standard. However, if the only thing that changes in between releases is something like the version number in the screen shot and not the software functionality being described, we do not update the screen shot just to keep it perfect.
In our cloud products, we are supplementing our textual documentation with in-application, interactive guides for the most critical or complicated tasks. These provide quick, intelligent, visual assistance to those who are visual learners or have difficulty using traditional documentation formats. The guides are relatively easy for us to maintain and they are version- and screen resolution-independent, which makes them more practical than other media. They also provide us with valuable metrics about how our customers actually use our products. We use that information to make our products even better.
Why are there so many manuals and some information is scattered around and not all in one place?
We typically organize technical documentation according to the reader’s role within their organization. For example, end-users, configuration experts, and system administrators are typically separate persons in our customers’ organizations. For many of our products, we offer a manual that is tailored for each of those persons that includes the tasks that they are likely to perform but excludes tasks that don’t pertain to them. Putting everything into one giant manual would make finding and using information harder for everybody. It would be a labyrinth to navigate and nearly impossible to print.
Granted, this does require some readers to refer to multiple manuals in order to fully understand some features from the perspectives of all roles. This is particularly true for smaller organizations like our integration partners. Some of the other standard procedures described in this FAQ are also aimed at making that easier; minimal use of screen shots and eliminating unnecessary text, to name two. We are also increasing the number of cross-references between manuals to reduce the barriers to finding information.
Why doesn’t your documentation describe how to configure the other applications and operating systems that it integrates with?
Maintaining documentation about how to use other companies’ products is their business, not ours. Their products change often, as do ours, and nobody can document them better than they can. We respectfully ask that you refer to their documentation about how to configure and use their products.
Why doesn’t your documentation state that it doesn’t do X or that it doesn’t work with product Y?
To document what our products do not do and the third-party products that they do not work with would take up an enormous amount of space and time. It would take more time and space than simply documenting what they do and what they work with. If our documentation does not explicitly state that it does something or that it works with a particular other product, then it very likely does not do so.
Why is your documentation so generic?
We all enjoy it when we use Google and find a very detailed solution to our specific problem. But remember, Google searches the entire Internet. They actually produce very little documentation of their own. We don’t have the whole world writing documentation for us so we cannot hope to cover every combination of products, versions, operating systems, and use cases.
Our technical documentation is not intended to be the sole and complete repository of all knowledge concerning our products, it simply cannot be. Like how we design our software, we strive to meet the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) and accept that 20% of customer cases will require personal assistance from their Accruent partner or Accruent Technical Support. We also encourage you to take advantage of our online customer community and the excellent training resources available in the Accruent Academy.
Why isn’t your documentation available in my native language?
Localizing and maintaining our technical documentation in every language where our products are used and without discrimination is a very resource-expensive challenge that we cannot yet meet without sacrificing the quality and affordability of our products. Until large scale localization becomes more affordable, we can only apologize to our many international customers and offer functionally advanced products that are the result of our priority of investing in superior software development over personalized documentation.
