Gearing up for the new crisper ALM Ranger guides, which will evolve into eBooks in future

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As highlighted by Michael Fourie who is driving our styling and new templates, this initiative has several purposes.
Mike Fourie3

  • Firstly to refresh the current FY13 templates following feedback from the field, i.e. end user issues. The majority, and increasing, user base is using e-readers. All changes we are adopting in this evolutionary refresh are targeted at improving the readability on e-readers and PC’s.
  • Secondly to reduce the overhead in generating a consistently formatted document. Layout and format gremlins are a headache to deal with during content generation. We are tweaking all styles so that we ban better rely on the defaults to provide a better authoring experience out the box.
  • Thirdly to evaluate the effort in updating guidance we have published to newer templates, both now and potentially in the future.

The following images show two of the prototype of merely applying the new style, without removing any content:

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The deltas are amazing and the readability on devices, such as the Windows Phone and Surface have been improved significantly.
I must admit that I personally do not use the phone device for reading our guides … the Surface and my Ultrabook are far more user friendly.
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Going forward there will be more content re-styling and efforts on creating crisper and more compact guidance. If you like this first prototype, you will love the upcoming new TFS Upgrade Guide Smile

In the meantime, please have a peak at the interim prototype and share your candid feedback in the comments below.

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