Oracle User Productivity Kit 3.5 – A review
As alluded to in an earlier post, I have received a copy of this book from those splendid people at Packt Publishing (www.PacktPub.com) to review.
Foreword
I have several technical books by Packt within my expanding library (all paid for I hasten to add – this is most definitely the first ‘freebee’ I’ve had). Without exception they have all been excellent reads / references, but none quite match the weighty tomb of the UPK 3.5 book that landed on the door mat. At just under 500 pages (excluding index) it is certainly a sizeable reference indeed.
I have written and presented technical training classes in my time, and quite often have to perform TOI sessions as part of my current engagement. However I have absolutely no exposure to UPK save for an excellent article I read in the Oracle Scene magazine last year. As it say’s on the rear cover, “this book has been written for new or intermediate training developers…” so I guess I should be an ideal test.
Oracle User Productivity Kit – The review
First impressions are that this book is well thought out for the beginner. It is structured such that it gently breaks-in the new user to the power of the product by taking you through a basic example, and then showing you how to amend and add to the content.
The topics are well thought out, with content topics grouped into logically related chapters. Thus the initial “Topic Editing” chapter sensibly touches on tasks that would be common to all users; namely adding Bubble Text and simple recording adjustments (such as adding in extra frames or re-capturing existing frames).
Once you are familiar with the basic steps of recording and editing your content, and are happy with how you organize and manage the content, the book then takes you through the process of publishing the content. UPK provides the ability to publish electronically, or via printed media (as in user manuals etc).
Electronic publishing is achieved via several methods; either using the dedicated UPK content player, via HTML web pages, or via an LMS package. As one who is familiar with the Oracle Learning Management module and who has done a lot of work with e-Learning, the LMS option was of particular interest.
The printed content publishing options were also extensive, and the ability to generate content that integrates with HP Quality Centre (or Mercury TestDirector as I knew it) is a nice touch that would go down well with larger organizations (including my present assignment I should add).
There is even the option to integrate your published content into the application itself – so the option to generate better context-specific help text and training into your production systems to enhance / supplant existing OEM help files is an option that would be beneficial to large application users. I’m thinking here that this product would have been a godsend on my current engagement, as the training of end-users has been a vast, expensive, and labour-intensive project in its own right.
One could argue that at this point in the book, the job is done. The reader has been given an overview of how to record, edit and publish the content. What more is there to know?
This is where this book starts to score (and effectively justify its price tag).
The topic of Version Management/Control is covered in enough detail relevant to UPK content. This is handy if you have (or plan to have) multiple developers generating and editing content as a collective collaborative project. Most development projects always benefit from some form of source control system, and I see no reason why this should not include the development of training materials.
Conditional branching and alternative actions within recorded content is something that I had not come across (or even thought about) before. One assumed that pre-recorded training content forced the users to follow the prescribed path. However UPK provides the ability to add in alternative actions, and multiple end-points for the recorded material. Thus if you work with an application that allows some task or other to be achieve in multiple ways (say a ‘short route’ for the expert user, and a ‘long route’ for the novice) then you can record and build these routes and paths into the training content. Fantastic idea!
Another area where UPK scores is with its ability to incorporate sound (i.e. speech) into the content. Pre-recorded sound files can be attached to individual pieces of text within a frame, which could be beneficial for, say, partially sighted users requiring verbal hints or confirmation of actions. Alternatively you can attach a single sound file for an entire frame within your content. One thing I did not see (and could not determine) was whether there was anyway to provide proper synchronisation of the recorded sound with the user actions. My guess is that this is not possible; so the frame sound file would play regardless of how quickly the user was interacting with the frame actions.
The book ends with a couple of chapters squarely aimed at advanced users (or installations). There is extensive coverage on how to alter the configuration of UPK, including changing the existing templates, replacing default icons with your own graphics, even as far as defining your own output document formats. As a novice user I glossed over this section, although a glance through showed me that most of the configuration files seemed to be XML based, so should prove to be quite simple to grasp and modify for the experienced users.
The other ‘advanced user’ chapter covered the topic of localising the content in your own language.
And there you have it. UPK in a nutshell.
Gripes?
I guess my biggest gripe with this book is the screenshots. They are all black-and-white. There are references very early on in the book which talk of specific coloured borders on active windows, and green/red indicators on the recorder bar. This is all lost when all you see are monochrome images. I appreciate that using colour images would (probably) increase the production (and therefore selling) costs of this book, but its an irritation. One wonders whether the eBook version could provide the colour screenshots instead?
As a new-comer I found the frequent references back to product differences between the historic product versions marginally distracting. Whilst the expert user may have found such product difference explanations of value I just wondered whether these could have simply been tagged with a reference number for a fuller explanation within their own chapter / appendix at the back of the book. It certainly would have removed some of the ‘clutter’ in some sections.
One plus-point to note was that you only got introduced to configurable items (options) as and when it became necessary. This was useful as a way of breaking in the new user gently to the large number of configuration settings that UPK has to offer without overloading.
In summary
For me, the book does exactly what it sets out to do. I have been given an excellent introduction to UPK, what it can do, and (more importantly) how to do it. Whilst it does not make me an experience user of it, should the need arise on any future engagements, at least I will have sufficient knowledge to hit the ground running. The author clearly demonstrates his knowledge of the product, and more importantly, knows how to convey this knowledge across to the uninitiated.
Existing users of the product would also benefit from this book. Whilst this is a large book to carry around, it should prove its worth in the ‘desk real-estate’ that it takes up by providing a handy reference guide. It is well indexed, and the chapters are neatly and logically collected and laid out.
I feel even experienced users may get some value out of having a copy as an aide-memoir.
I’d like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me the opportunity to review this book. I’d like to think that perhaps I could review some other titles (Oracle or otherwise) in the future.
For the interested, here’s the link to the book http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-user-productivity-kit-upk-3-5?utm_source=coopersconsultingsolutions.com&utm_medium=bookrev&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=mdb_001016