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I've Googled this topic with few useful results and I've checked the
TECHWR-L archives but came up with no information specific to my situation.
Current environment: Windows XP, FrameMaker 7.1, ClearCase 2002 (?)
We are trying to develop a tool/workflow combination that will allow us to
maintain documents that contain information about features available in
multiple product lines across multiple product releases. We want to be able
to "branch" a document to allow for differences in features across product
lines and product releases (adding additional flexibility beyond what we can
manage using variables and conditional text) and to "merge" some of these
branched changes back into the mainline document when certain features
become widely available across multiple product lines. The constraint is
that we need a document to have the same file name across multiple
products/releases so that all cross-references and cross-document links
work.
Basically we want to be able to version and control our documents in a
similar fashion to the way our developers version and control their code. We
realize that there are deficiencies in the "merge" capabilities of the tools
we are using (CC doesn't merge binary files, FM doesn't do a very good job
at merging its own files in a useful way), so we are trying to decide
whether changing our Frame output format to XML will overcome some of these
problems. Is it advisable to branch and merge XML documents? On the surface
it seems to be an easy way to get around CC's inability to deal with binary
files, but will the merged files cause trouble when opened in FrameMaker?
Are we going to get unexpected results when we attempt to branch and merge
FM-generated XML files?
We are currently just beginning to convert legacy content from Word and
Interleaf into FrameMaker 7.1, so we have no existing FM workflow for either
structured or unstructured content. This allows us to choose the best
solution for the problem without having to worry about how to deal with a
legacy workflow in FrameMaker.
We are basically interested in determining whether moving to structured FM
with XML as an output will allow us to do real file merging, thus allowing
us to maintain a single "parent" file (with associated branches) for each of
our documents. Is anyone currently using FrameMaker as their XML generation
tool, controlling these files using ClearCase, and using the built-in FM and
CC tools to manage XML documents that need to be branched and merged? Is
this an advisable approach? Is there some alternative approach that we are
missing? Any lessons learned about this combination of tools used for this
purpose? Any resources on this topic that I may have missed?
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