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Our organizations embrace multiple platforms as a way to maximize product usage and to offset the high cost of software development. However, this results in many difficult challenges for software developers. In our part of the development process, the design and implementation of our user assistance components is dictated largely by the nature and number of different platforms we need to support. In our survey we asked respondents to identify all of the platforms their products run on. Almost all of the survey respondents (97%) indicated that their products supported the Windows platform as the following figure shows. The breakdown of support within the Windows platform is described in the Windows Help section of this report.
The World Wide Web was recognized as the second biggest platform with 58% of respondents supporting it. Most software organizations appear to already have versions of their products that can be delivered over the Web or to have some sort of strategy for doing so in the future. Server-side deployment of user assistance will be a growing issue for us over the next few years. The presence of UNIX continues to be very strong with 39% of us supporting it. With at least a dozen flavors of UNIX and no common Help standard, browser-based Help has become the most popular solution for user assistance in that arena.
Cross-platform SupportOur user assistance development becomes more difficult as the number of platforms we support grows. Support for just one or two platforms allows us to better customize our efforts on those platforms. Three or more platforms leads us to consider techniques like single sourcing and browser-based Help. See the figure below.
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