vtiger CRM documentations

It seems that the document became already to large for our docbook installation. Unfortunately, we are unable to create a PDF right now. Until we fix this problem, we will post the manual as HTML or HTML Chunk files only.

We have made progress with the graphical work and added more chapters. That includes the description of import and export procedures for contacts, leads and potentials with some sample data.

The draft for the first two chapters is almost done and can be downloaded at the “vtiger manual 4.2” section of this page as html and html chunk files. So you can already read how contacts and accounts are beeing created, what sales stages are and why Leads are special. We also included a chapter that explains the import data format for Leads and explained some of the issues with CSV and Excel.
We will have a native speaker take a look at it. A lot formatting work still needs to be done also. That is true for the text as well as for the screenshots (most of them are still in German).

Considering the upcoming V.5 release we have made modification to the table of content to give the document a modified structure . With the new structure we will be able hopefully to maintain both the V4.2 and V.5.0 with little need for changes.

The manual work is progressing, slowly but steadily. We will continue to post it here and you may watch the progress. Today we got a volunteer who will help us to do the graphical work. That will speed up the process but of course it still take some time as anybody can imagine. The German manual contains more than 125 screenshots and other graphics which needs to be converted into an English version.

So we have now the first step finished and created a table of contents (toc), the first chapter and some appendixes for the manual. You may have a look at it at the “vtiger manual 4.2” section of this page. There you can find the manual:

• as a single HTML page (as it gets larger we will see how long we can support this format)
• as multiple HTML pages (which is probably the best way to read it online)
• as a Windows Help file (download it to a Windows computer and start it there)

The toc is based on our German version. Now we have to translate the content. As soon a chapter is ready it will posted here whithout additional information to the community. Of course this is work in progress. Everybody is invited to check in from time to time to watch the progress and -most important – to give us hints, comments or other contributions for improving the document.

at the rigt side of this page there is a link to “vtiger DocBooks Samples“. There you can find the vtiger Customer Portal documentation for v.4.2. It is posted as XML Source and in different output formats all created from this single DocBook source:

• Windows Help File
• PDF
• HTML single site
• HTML multiple sites

This serves only as an example/exercise to show some of the advantages of the DocBook format for vtiger software documentations. It also supports our proposal to to establish DocBook as a standard for vtiger documentations.
The XML Source Files are based on a complete copy of the vtiger documentation posted at the vtiger Web page. Stylesheets are not provided but you can use any standard based DocBook stylesheets with this example. The stylesheets are work in progress and as soon we have a more sophisticated solution we will post it here. If somebody has already better stylesheets please let us know.
Any comments?

Open Office or other simelar text editors are not very suitable for technical documentations. Therefore alternatives have to be explored. Currently

• LaTeX (see Wiki)
• DocBook (see Wiki)

are the most discussed. Any comments or preferences?