Admin and End-User documentation

@daniel.pan
Can you please provide a public End-User manual for usage of the Seafile Frontend and Seafile Clients as well as the Apps?

Since years there is no user manual for Seafile and users constantly ask for a manual that they understand. The german GmbH started the manual for end users but this page is not accessable anymore and we seriously need something to show to users. How to you expect users to use and buy your software if you do not provide any documention for them? The server manul is “ok” for admins, though I personally prefer some more tidiness in there as it’s quiet messy.

The manual should no be designed like the server manual as it needs to cover older Seafile Server version as well, due to many changes. As well the manual for End-Users should contain many screeenshots to explain what they should be looking for.

The part that is provided with the server under “https://seafile.domain.de/help/” does not really show anything that one needs to know about Seafile.

Please take a look at how e.g. Nextcloud is doing it. They define an admin documention and a user documention.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/admin_manual/
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/user_manual/

Thanks in advance!

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We have user manuals here: https://www.seafile.com/en/help/

But at the moment it doesn’t cover the mobile clients and has not much screenshots. We’re still improving it.

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That documention is somewhat ok, but is still only in one language - English.

Please consider to provide the manual in other languages as well or at least provide the Google page translation button on every page of the documentation. We have users who do not speak English (German, French, Spanish, Hungarian,…).

Don’t get me wrong, but the admin documention should be similar if not in the same design as the user manual.
As mentioned before the documentation needs a reboot at some point.

@Jonathan Do you understand what I mean?

Suggestion for urls

Short term:
https://www.seafile.com/help/admin
https://www.seafile.com/help/admin/pro
https://www.seafile.com/help/user

Long term:
https://docs.seafile.com/server/#Version#/admin_manual
https://docs.seafile.com/server/#Version#/user_manual
https://docs.seafile.com/server/#Version#/admin_manual/pro
https://docs.seafile.com/server/#Version#/user_manual/pro

https://docs.seafile.com/client/#Version#/admin_manual
https://docs.seafile.com/client/#Version#/user_manual
https://docs.seafile.com/client/#Version#/admin_manual/pro
https://docs.seafile.com/client/#Version#/user_manual/pro

The client as well as the the server needs different manuals that show only options that are available in PRO.

This way it is also possible for you guys to keep manual for each and every version of the server. You can even continue using Github as codebase for the documentation, even though the framework for the frontend page should change (design, responsiveness etc.)

Thanks!

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I think something like that was planned to be in:

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Nice, I hope that keep the menu clean. :slight_smile:

Hi,

Up @Jonathan !

“The french user community” (@gauburtin @David @simon.piquard) :relaxed: is also very interested in this subject…

We talk about this together (especially about end-user documentation) and first, we find too many differents documentations and informations in differents places :

We think it would be great to improve end-user documentation with some ideas that could be :

  • first : only one documentation !
  • documentation versioning : for different Seafile Server versions features
  • documentation versioning : for Community and Pro features
  • explicite indications for Client version features
  • documentation translation (automatically generate with any tool, and maybe share to community to sum to corrections -> something like transifex ?)

After that, documentation could be on your website (for latest Server version), and in seahub for different server versions.

Another important idea : documentation could be in markdown format (on seahub) to allow Seafile administrator (for example) to edit or add documentation easily, for example to meet specific needs or to correct a bad translation (until the correction is propagated in the next version).

I think these are not too complicated changes to put in place (at least a part of), but they could change many things for us.

It’s only some ideas, and we are open to discuss about other solutions, but it’s sure for us, just like it seems to be for @DerDanilo that documentation can and must be improved.

Finally, can we hope for some changes shortly ?

Thank you for reading my entire speech :innocent:

PS: About admin documentation, I personally think it would be great to redesign it totally, and provide version would correspond to each different server version.

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For the end user document, please check Seafile user help translation