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Internal Customers
Internal customers can tell you a lot about what’s important in your documents too. Everyone who sends documents from one part of a company to another has customers. Anyone who uses your document within your organization is your internal customer.
If you’re in a management position in your company, and you’re involved in setting up your SGML environment, this is a great excuse to ask questions within your department! This is one time when asking for complaints from the troops will pay great dividends!
There are a lot of strategies for getting feedback from “the troops” on how to make your documents better. You can:
- • Call everyone together in a room and talk it out. Everyone might feel free to speak his peace if it’s not in writing and if everyone else is in the room together. There’s some security in numbers, and you might get some candid input.
- • Have everyone respond in writing or e-mail to a survey. This has the advantage of being written down, but the major disadvantage is that it has everyone’s name right on the paper. Some people might hold back their remarks because they think they’ll be approached about them at a later time.
- • Have everyone gather in a conference room and respond to an anonymous written survey. This has the advantage of “safety in numbers” for the people, and it also has the advantage of getting suggestions in writing. If you precede the survey with some brainstorming, you can also benefit from the group dynamics!
- • Have everyone respond in writing or e-mail to a survey. This has the advantage of being written down, but the major disadvantage is that it has everyone’s name right on the paper. Some people might hold back their remarks because they think they’ll be approached about them at a later time.
Since many managers wind up putting out fires in the department, they sometimes don’t get to stand back and look at their department objectively. Combining the opinions of internal and external customers are a chance to get this objectivity. When both internal and external customers identify the same issues over and over again, you know those issues will likely influence your SGML enterprise.
Customer Tools
Your customers use hardware and software as tools to access your documents, and those platforms have their own requirements and limitations. The point here is to consider how both your internal and external customers access your documents. If you’re a commercial publisher of computer books, you might be interested in whether your readers would enjoy reading your book on a CD-ROM. Or, would they prefer both the hardcopy book and the CD-ROM. Obviously, if all your customers can only access your documents in paper form, SGML won’t do them a whole lot of good! If their tool is primarily shelf space for hardcopy books, SGML will be primarily for you.
Realistically, however, if your customers are currently committed to hard copy alone, that will have to change. It’s only a matter of time before electronic resources will be everyday tools for them. Your SGML work will pay off for them eventually. It will pay off for you quickly after you get everything up and running.
Tip:
Try looking at access tools by internal and external customer, and also by local and remote access.
• For more on content-sensitive tables, see “Handling Tables,” p. 421
Your first task is to classify the tools your customers use so you can decide whether they present any challenges or additional considerations for defining your environment. Do you have people who access your documents remotely as well as locally? For example, if you have customers who access your documents over a networked database, you might need to build more intelligent document structures into your DTDs to facilitate the various uses they will serve in that database. This is particularly important with table structures, for example. If people will sort your tables, then you must build content-sensitive tables into your DTDs. As usual, a form helps you focus your efforts where it counts (see fig. 6.5).
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Fig. 6.5 This sample tool sheet helps you figure out what tools all your internal and external customers are using, and whether they are using local or remote tools.
You’ll notice that each tool has the potential to present challenges. For example, if someone is using an old Wang word processing system, and he needs to access your SGML documents through it, that means you have to check for an SGML viewer for Wang! Or, at least, you need to be alerted to that prospective problem. (Whose problem it ultimately is you’ll have to figure out!)
Note:
Keep an eye out for big, obscure tools that your customers have a big commitment to. For example, old mainframes running old operating systems may not support the more recent SGML tools.Also, look for niche products for which there might be a smaller range of available SGML tools available. This situation is a little more common. There are some excellent computers out there that don’t have a wide following of software developers. The Apple Macintosh, for example, is an exquisite machine that doesn’t have a lot of support, compared to the PC, its big competitor. There are plenty of tools for the Macintosh, but not nearly as many as there are for the PC.
• See “Authoring and Conversion Tools for the Mac,” p. 468
Decide whether any of these tools will cause you any problems. If you don’t know whether your customer’s tools are unusual or not, simply ask. As long as they use mainstream computers, there should be no major problem.
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