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Subject:Modular Help in Proprietary Software From:"Brasel, Russell" <russell -dot- brasel -at- hccredit -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 7 Nov 2006 12:07:58 -0600
Good, er, what's left of morning. I'm looking for any advice or
pointers concerning my current project.
I work for a financial (sub-prime lender) company that employs about 130
people. We're in the process of designing a new proprietary software
system for the financial side of the company-collections, credit
approval, customer care, and so forth-and I'm the first technical writer
they have had. One of my jobs-in fact, my primary job-is to create a
help system that we'll embed into our Version 4 (yeah, really original
name) system. That, and writing developer documentation for the
procedures we have not phased out from Version 3.
Right now, I'm using Doc-to-Help Enterprise (latest build), MS Word
2003, Paint Shop Pro XI to build the html help. The source
documentation, if I were to put it into a single word document, would be
well over 50 MB, and that's likely to corrupt. Has anyone here had any
experience in building a modular help system? I'm fairly new to
Doc-to-Help and HATs in general. I think modular help is the best way
to keep the documents small and readily editable in case we change
procedure, the GUI, etc., and also, it will target the information more
accurately: for instance, collections doesn't need the same information
as credit approval, etc.
Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Russell G. Brasel
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