Preference®

PREFERENCE is a centralized online help and reference system that works concurrently with your existing mainframe applications. It solves the immediate problems of workers who use these applications to do their jobs. With PREFERENCE, employees receive consistent, reliable assistance without depending on co-workers, supervisors, manuals, help desks, or trial-and-error. Indeed, PREFERENCE offers the high-value mentoring employees need—at the exact moment of need.

PREFERENCE gives many ways to access reference information. Employees can:

• Select a chapter, topic, or section from the table of contents
• Enter an index term and specify a search of the current volume or group of volumes
• "Jump" to related information via hypertext, which brings this information instantly on-screen
• Return to a bookmark they've placed earlier
• Page through the full text of a reference volume
• Scan for an occurrence of a key term in the full text
  

To ensure employees get exactly the help they need, PREFERENCE incorporates smart help and decision support:

• Smart help tailors assistance to the task at hand—the current application, screen, field (and values within each field), cursor position, and so on. Smart help can display valid entries for a field, or coach an employee through closing a sale.
• Decision support ensures employees make the right decisions. PREFERENCE leads them through a series of questions, evaluates the response data (which can be saved for later analysis), and presents the best choice. This can, for example, help a customer support representative recommend the best product to a customer.
  

PREFERENCE makes creating online help and reference easy. Trainers:

• Do not need to change existing application code to implement online help and reference
• Control the content and scope of assistance employees receive—dynamic help windows, reference materials, examples, decision matrixes, and windows to external data from VSAM and DB2 files (used to present ever-changing information, such as rates)
• Use the product's built-in hierarchy of volume, chapter, topic, section, and screen to easily organize and present online information
• Create and maintain only one version of online help and reference—no modifications are needed for specific access methods, terminals or keyboards.
  

Quick Links

Phoenix and Preference Overview

Phoenix and Preference Customer Zone