Content types in software documentation
As a reference, here are definitions of the types of content deliverables that we publish on Experience League (and some we don’t):
In SCCM, a guide is an online collection of pages referenced in a table of contents. Product documentation guides describe our official, best-practice guidance about using our software. The audience can be end users, administrators, or developers. Example user guide.
A user guide contains overviews and FAQs (concepts), and procedures (tasks) about product features.
Adobe’s product teams are responsible for these guides. Important: Adobe can be held contractually accountable for the information in product documentation.
A tutorial is often defined as a set of instructions to help a user accomplish a use case. As a comparison, if product documentation describes how to install an oven, a tutorial describes how to bake a certain type of cake.
Tutorials can be video or text-based and can range from a single article or video to a larger, multi-step set of text and video-based guidance. They are created and managed in the -learn repositories and published to the Tutorials section on Experience League.
Tutorials should supplement and link to product documentation rather than repeat information. Writing teams should frequently communicate with tutorial authors to avoid repetition.
developer.adobe.com.Adobe expert-curated collection of content, typically comprised of multiple lessons to educate users about a broad area, use case, or product (like implementation, user fundamentals). Courses are developed for target audience roles/role responsibilities.
See the Experience League Courses landing to browse courses.
Support articles are ideally brief write-ups with information that is temporarily relevant and useful in specific situations. Support information includes upcoming outages, release issues, product workarounds, or troubleshooting help for these situations.
If you author Support articls and find yourself documenting standard product functionality as part of the article (steps in a task, for example), you should stop writing and instead cross-reference to the formal documentation. If you can’t find the documentation, notify the writer or product manager for that product.
In-product help
Contextual guidance to help users understand UI elements and workflows.
See How to add contextual help popovers to the Experience Platform documentation and UI (wiki).