Training Videos

[Walter Vaughan <wv...@steelerubber.com>]

I still subscribe to the mailing list of the commercial RAD package we are 
migrating from, and one of the "guru" users put together a series of training 
videos last year. That's all well and good, ofBiz has training video too with 
printed transcription. What makes it difficult for me to use the ofBiz videos as 
a reference is that you have to watch a lot to find what you might be looking for.

That was the same problem his training videos had (except he didn't even have 
transcripts).

Now I don't suggest everyone watch this unless you want to see how perhaps we 
could come up with some sort of "vidiwiki" that would greatly help with training 
and reference guides. John (the presenter on this video) is 99% blind so he has 
to use a screen reader and his screens are set on high contrast, but what's more 
important is the concept and if we could do something like this for 
ofBiz/openTaps. If you've been frustrated with the training videos however, the 
20 minutes this runs might get some ideas flowing.

http://www.valar.com/forum1.wmv

On of the cooler features he had was downloadable indexing so that as 
improvements to the keywords and categories occur the whole system improves.

I just think perhaps this is something that would benefit developers greatly if 
we had "something" like this.

--
Walter

Re: Training Videos

[Jonathon -- Improov <jo...@improov.com>]

Walter,

I can't play .wmv files. I think it's a bad idea to use formats that are not community-friendly 
(so other folks can edit and contribute updates), such as PDF, wmv (or any other video format!), 
MS Word, etc.

Many newcomers to OFBiz had the same problem you did with those training videos. I myself mention 
on the ML that videos are impossible or time-consuming to search through for info.

Those who got any decent headstart would probably be those who bought the Undersun docs at 
www.undersunconsulting.com/ecommerce . While I can somewhat vouch for the case of learning OFBiz 
without those docs (I took OFBiz apart in some "way" to create 100% accurate docs myself), I can't 
say the same for everybody else, though.

I had mentioned that publishing docs (not selling them) would fuel an explosive growth of the 
developer community, which will in turn mean explosively rapid development of OFBiz.

I believe that David (Jones) has difficulty publishing those necessary docs; they belong to 
Undersun. But he also gave me impression he doesn't believe that publishing those necessary docs 
will aid "the explosive growth of the OFBiz-enabled engineer [contributor] population": "If this 
were the only factor I would release those materials under the Apache license right away."

As I mentioned in another post: "they [Apache, Tomcat] work well OOTB and they have very good and 
widely published docs to further fuel explosive rate of community development". David agrees with 
that.

As it is now, I'm not sure if David wants to publish those necessary docs to explode growth of 
OFBiz engineers/contributors. That's one of the main reasons I'm holding back myself too.

Let me know if there exists a system that allows me to search for keywords in a video format? Thanks.

I still don't believe that video docs are the way to go.

Jonathon

Walter Vaughan wrote:
> I still subscribe to the mailing list of the commercial RAD package we 
> are migrating from, and one of the "guru" users put together a series of 
> training videos last year. That's all well and good, ofBiz has training 
> video too with printed transcription. What makes it difficult for me to 
> use the ofBiz videos as a reference is that you have to watch a lot to 
> find what you might be looking for.
> 
> That was the same problem his training videos had (except he didn't even 
> have transcripts).
> 
> Now I don't suggest everyone watch this unless you want to see how 
> perhaps we could come up with some sort of "vidiwiki" that would greatly 
> help with training and reference guides. John (the presenter on this 
> video) is 99% blind so he has to use a screen reader and his screens are 
> set on high contrast, but what's more important is the concept and if we 
> could do something like this for ofBiz/openTaps. If you've been 
> frustrated with the training videos however, the 20 minutes this runs 
> might get some ideas flowing.
> 
> http://www.valar.com/forum1.wmv
> 
> On of the cooler features he had was downloadable indexing so that as 
> improvements to the keywords and categories occur the whole system 
> improves.
> 
> I just think perhaps this is something that would benefit developers 
> greatly if we had "something" like this.
> 
> -- 
> Walter
> 
> 
>