Documentation to online help & program help help

["Belinda Kelly" <bkelly -at- ebetonline -dot- com>]

Hi there - I'm just after some ideas about various technological options to
handle my company's documentation needs. Basically, I'm the new tech writer
and I've been busy transforming all the programmer-written docs into
something our clients can actually use. Now, I've got a pile of Word docs
stacking up.

What I'd like to do is -
a) somehow put bundle these documents in with our software, and
b) eventually get them on the company's extranet so that clients can view
the latest documentation after logging into the site.

There's a couple of solutions:
1) Get a Word-compatible help program that will transform all the documents
into a windows help system with a minimum of fuss. Also, I'd like it if this
help system can be easily glued onto the extranet down the track, perhaps
one based on HTML. Is there any information on the joys and pains of the
various help system products? What do people recommend? (e.g. RoboHelp,
Webworks Publisher, Doc-to-Help, ForeHelp...)
2) The web developer suggests setting up a HTML database, which will (he
claims) be able to produce print-ready documents based on a template. He is
dismissive of any program that claims to produce 'clean' HTML from a Word
source. I'm unsure of the database idea in practice - while it will be
perfect from the online perspective, I'm unsure of whether what the
information will look like after it's extracted out to a help system or a
hardcopy manual.
3) Convert the docs to PDF, which solves the a) and b) above quite nicely,
but doesn't really seem to fulfil my dream of having a nifty searchable,
html-style help system.

Known factors:
-The Development section isn't really interested in documentation and think
that documenting their software would "slow them down" and "waste time".
Therefore online help for the software wouldn't be context sensitive (as I
understand it) as the developers say they don't have time to set context
IDs. So any help would have to be in a floating, online manual format.
-While I can request all the new software I like, it'd have to be something
cheap to get through the bean-counters, especially with the Australian
dollar the way it as at the moment.
-There isn't much of an information management policy in place at the
moment, so I've got a fair amount of control over information policy design
and information distribution.

Thanks for any and all suggestions!

Belinda R. Kelly
Technical Writer
eBet Limited
Ph: 8748 8022
bkelly -at- ebetonline -dot- com



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