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We have a suite of tools, each documented separately by writers who fully
understand only their particular tool.
Since customers often use these tools in combination, the company wants to
improve the help by:
A. Documenting cross-product tasks.
B. Integrating the doc set as much as possible to make it both less
redundant and more interactive (ie., when possible links between different
product books, and searches across the entire set).
At this point, we write our "print" documentation in FrameMaker (it isn't
actually printed anymore, except when the customer prints the PDF), and
produce online help with RoboHelp. The online help is often .chm files,
but in some cases web help. Of course we also have readmes, which are
usually in text format, but could be converted to HTML.
So I'm looking for input from anyone who has ever faced the challenge of
integrating a company's documentation on both levels described above.
In regards to A: What kind of collaborative relationships have you
experienced to make this happen? Does it happen? My bias is towards tech
writers having technical mastery of their products (not just of their
writing software), and I think this requirement for cross-product
documentation will make that even more necessary.
In regards to B: How do you provide the most integrated possible doc set
when interim release dates differ? Assuming we were going to actually link
different help files for different products, and insert cross-book PDF
hyperlinks between products handled by different writers, what rules and
what file structure would be necessary to get this done. And what
limitations would we have to live with?
Already, as the word of this initiative is spreading, I am seeing requests
from managers like this:
"As we think about our next generation documentation and help system for
our platform, I would like to have us consider leveraging a NLP based
knowledge base that would allow a user to pose questions and get rapid
relevant results back ....think Ask Jeeves for our documentation. "How Do
I build A Slowly Changing Dimension"?? "
I have some doubts as to whether we're going to make it to the Ask Jeeves
level of functionality.
Any and all suggestions and experiences are welcome.
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