Omniture documentation
One of the many things about Omniture that makes a really nice first impression, is the amount of technical documentation available. It appears that everything has been documented in great detail.
But, after some time you’ll probably realize that while the amount of documentation is impressive, the quality isn’t always equally impressive.
So what’s the problem ?
Well in many of the cases I’ve found myself it simply seems as if that the documentation hasn’t been able to keep up the pace, as the products and API’s have evolved.
In other situations you won’t find the information where You would expect to find it, a lot of stuff ended up in the knowledge base instead of the documents where the information belongs.
And finally, there are things that are completely undocumented.
Lets take a look at a few examples:
In Understanding the Data Insertion API, in the section about Data Insertion Mechanisms, the documentation says:
“The SiteCatalyst response to each data insertion includes a status message (SUCCESS or FAILURE).”
It’s possible that’s the way things used to be, but it certainly is no more, now you’ll only get a status message in case of success, in case of failure you get no reply at all, and because of this, the accompanying PHP Data Insertion sample kode also ends up being a lot less useful than it could have been.
The section about Visitor Identification completely fails to mention the fact that you can reuse data from the existing visitorID cookie set by Omniture in case you are running a 1. party cookie solution, and thereby making it really easy to mix Data Insertion API tracking with normal Javascript beacon tracking.
Omniture makes frequent updates to the core javascript tracking code, but both major and minor releases are made without any kind of release notes.
Even something as basic as the SiteCatalyst implementation guide contains some obvious goofs, I can’t help thinking: If obvious errors aren’t caught by the editor & technical writers, wonder how many non-obvious errors the documentation contains ?
