Oracle UPK and Oracle Knowledge Pathways
If you're thinking about purchasing Oracle's UPK or Knowledge Pathways product, don't. If your boss is thinking about purchasing it, find some way to dissuade him. I don't have any recommendations of alternative software packages to go with, but I expect any other choice would result in less frustration and greater productivity.
The software itself is amazing, or at least the theoretical end results look amazing. Getting to those end results is another story entirely. The product documentation is absolutely atrocious. Your only choices for training are either a 5-day live class or a 5-day online class, both of which are $3K extra. We did not pay for either, given the bait and switch the salesperson pulled on us, but ended up getting the training guide after complaining often and loudly up the Oracle hierarchy. I've been a trainer for 15 years now. The training itself isn't bad, there just isn't any sort of troubleshooting guide or any resource to go to if something doesn't work the way it is supposed to. The only options are to submit a Service Report, which is a convoluted process to say the least, or to try and get help on the My Oracle Support Community. The latter is usually a better bet. There apparently used to be a forum for the software that Oracle got rid of when they bought the companies involved. So rather than being able to find out what solved problems similar to the ones I experiencing when other people had them, I need to start from scratch every time, like I'm the sole user of this software.
The frustrating thing is that when it does work, it really is amazing software. We had to harass Oracle into bringing in one of their Lead Engineers to address our initial problems with the Knowledge Pathways product, and they managed to get that up and running eventually. Now that we're finally delving into UPK, it seems this product is even more buggy and so very user-unfriendly.
The real irony is that the product is designed to help deliver training - you can basically take a virtual video of any particular task and show someone step-by-step how to accomplish it. Given that, you would think that Oracle would use their own bloody software to show how it works, wouldn't you? Maybe the fact they didn't is telling, as it seems like this is going to be another run of angry calls to Oracle and their jury-rigging our software so we can get it to work.