At work, yesterday, we were clearing out some stores from various secret network locations, and something unusual caught my eye. A picture of raspberries. Among the stacks of various boring manuals, disclaimer sheets, warranty information, licensing terms, and tons of useless documentation, there was this book in colour. Plus, a photo of raspberries. How interesting.
Then, as my eyes scanned upward from the raspberries in the lower right corner of the cover, the text “Cookbook” leapt out. Really, a food book among all the boring product documentation we have strewn all over the place? I must love chocolates a lot too, because that chocolate sauce on the page looked really delicious. I must have been hungry.
As I finally read the subtext, “Recipes for Success with your FortiGate”, I realised this was yet another product documentation. It’s for our firewall. It has been around for almost a year, but I’ve not actually flipped through its paper documentation. You know how techies like me work. We dive straight into the product without reading manuals. Sometimes we spend more time than we would have had we actually read the manuals first. But it’s often far more exciting to play around with the product first than to read boring documentation. Particularly those on paper.
Did you notice that the firewall hardware, in the photo above, is “cut through” and the sides have been made out to look like a cake? I think this is the first enterprise network product with a manual that looks really so attractive.
In fact, the title itself, sounded exciting enough to make me want to bring it back up to my office to read. You know, it sounds like those self-help kind of books. But alas, the contents weren’t quite so interesting. It’s a getting-started sort of guide, though at 217 pages, it’s pretty long.