I'm no fan of the BVC5 manual as it is, but by just reading and playing for a few hours I think a dozen questions asked by newer users in the last week or so could have been avoided.


Here they are:



BVC4, a good fill-in for BVC5's gaps: http://www.bvsoftware.com/bvc2004/manual/



BVC5, a product in the making: http://www.bvsoftware.com/bvcommerce5manual/





Remember when it took a half a day to see your post and another half day to get an answer approved by the moderator and posted?

I miss both of SF's manuals. 174 pages ( I printed them) for the Control Panel and 285 pages for the User Guide.

A start would be an on-line knowledge base/How do I? FAQ

As Marcus said... time. True, BUT... If your current customers can't recommend the software for lack of a manual with a TOC and Index, it costs money to leave things as is.

I can't imagine telling someone (who's frustrated enough to call me) to go edit workflows instead of toggling a switch in the admin. Some things are just WAY too cumbersome for the average merchant. I've still got to figure out how you can select "merge identical items" in the Cart Orders tab and select "ship separately" on the product edit page and make sense. Neither is clearly explained in the manual.... Throw in Andy's (spectacular) Shipper and you're good... but, Jeez!

Took me a month to understand that you can build packages by zeroing out the items you don't want in the package. Manual, NOTHING!

There are dozens of gaps like this that have cost me 100 hours to figure out. I'd never subject my friends to this.

Dunno. Not sure the user base has a large enough cross section of user types to gather anything but information that is so specific it'd be useless for anyone else.


A couple of pages of gantt charts and flow charts would be a great first effort.


A general "How do I?" section would be a great start. 100 or more Q/A can be gleaned from the forum... but I don't have that kind of time.

My wife uses SAP and runs the AT&T, Lucent and a few Baby Bell databases/service contracts departments. (The phone companies aren't as divested as you might think) She writes/maintains manuals like this for 100's of sales people/users and keeping them current and in street english is a constant battle. She looks over my shoulder every so often and has tried to find things in the BV5 manual and/or the admin. She thinks it'd be a near impossibility to write a comprehensive user manual in under 4 months working full time. We can't afford her, but we do need someone who doesn't just speak "geek".

"Item has been added to cart" should be a site term, but isn't. Except to stumble into it or remember where it was that you saw it, it can't be found to edit. Thsi would be my vote for the first 'On-screen terminology - where-the-heck-did-I-see-it' database entry!

I'm all for a wiki or knowledgebase. We have so many people here who are intimately familiar with BV that it seems a waste to not record the FAQs for those who are just starting.

Anyone here ever use any SmarterTools products? i.e. SmarterMail? It's a wonderful product. The reason I bring it up is because I love the way their help/manual is integrated. I often have wished the same were true with BVCommerce.


What I'm talking about is when you're in the BVAdmin, there could be a link on the page that says "Help for this Page" or "Help for this Topic" and you click on it, and a new window would open which would have the appropriate page in the manual. It would be a lot easier than having to go to the BVCommerce site each time and hunt for the right place in the manual (if help for that topic exists at all).



I also miss having a manual in PDF form.



Also, another ecommerce product's KB, though they had one, really sucked. The search was never accurate, and you couldn't just browse through the KB articles (though I've been told they've finally just recently added this exciting new feature).