TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
If you need static HTML, FrameMaker can do that with Save as HTML. To
my knowledge Flare has no such feature out of the box, but you could
probably customize one of the HTML-based templates to strip out the
web help stuff if necessary.
With Flare, you can generate Word, turn Track Changes on, and give
that to reviewers, or generate a PDF and edit it in Acrobat to enable
commenting.
For questions about structured FrameMaker (i.e. FrameMaker XML), you
might try the Framers mailing list (see http://www.frameusers.com )
but with only 1.5 writers DITA is probably the opposite of
cost-effective.
I asked about Salesforce as a doc host a few months ago and got one response:
On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 8:06 PM, Tom Johnson <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> I deliver some web help through Salesforce's "Site.com" community feature.
> You can upload a complete website in there and apply different permissions
> about who can see it.
>
> The only problem is that there's no way to SSH into Salesforce to transfer
> your content via the command line (there's not even FTP). You have to use
> upload controls in the browser, and it's slow. For about a 15MB site that
> has 200 files, the upload process can take 3-5 minutes (depending on your
> network speed).
>
> I dislike Salesforce as a delivery platform (it feels nearly on par with
> Sharepoint to me), but if your customer experience team is bent on using it
> to deliver content to users (despite the extremely high cost of doing so,
> since you have to pay for each customer license), it might be the only
> solution that leverages the right authentication controls.
>
> Tom
>
> ---------------------
> blog: idratherbewriting.com
> twitter: tomjohnson
> email: tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com
> cell: 408-540-8562
>
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 2:06 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Has anyone used Salesforce as a host for context-sensitive web help,
>> and if so, how good is it?
>>
>> Ideally I'd just want to be able to dump the help project for a
>> particular release in a particular directory and have Salesforce
>> control who gets access.
On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Robyn Chittister
<rchittister -at- vlocity -dot- com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm 1 of 1-1/2 technical writers at a start up that creates cloud apps for
> Salesforce. We are currently using Salesforce Knowledge to create and
> deliver our documentation. Knowledge is possibly the worst documentation
> tool I have ever used. We've been looking at various single-sourcing
> solutions, and we're down to MadCap Flare and FrameMaker.
>
> I've never used Flare. We had a pitch meeting with MadCap, and it seems
> like Flare does everything we want it to do. The only thing that we weren't
> sure about is how Flare might deliver a format that can be integrated into
> a Salesforce app. Even the engineer and sales consultant didn't know. I
> know that Salesforce uses Flare to create their developer documentation,
> but that's separate from what appears in their actual product.
>
> Meanwhile, I'm a FrameMaker user from way back - I started with FM+SGML 5.5
> in 1999. I developed templates and tools for FM+SGML and FM+XML from
> 1999-2005. I've used FM 12 in an unstructured environment, and am happy to
> see the improvements. I'm not sure how many improvements there have been in
> the structured environment, however. I've tried to contact Adobe, and have
> gotten a human being to say he'll give my questions to a solutions
> specialist to answer. Knowing Adobe, I'm not going to hold my breath.
>
> My questions are:
>
> - Is anyone here writing doc for Salesforce or Salesforce apps? If so,
> what tools do you use?
> - Is there a good comparison of the most recent versions of Flare v. FM?
> The only ones I've been able to find are from several years ago.
> - Is anyone here using FM+XML (either v12 or 2015) who could answer some
> specific questions I have about it?
> - If you use Flare, how do you handle the review process? Our reviewers
> will not have the MadCap software to comment on docs, so we're concerned
> about how to manage comments and the like.
>
> We're a Mac house, so I can't just download the trial versions. We
> understand that we will need to get me set up with a VM and Windows to use
> the software we choose.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.archives @ http://techwr-l.com/archives
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Visit TechWhirl for the latest on content technology, content strategy and content development | http://techwhirl.com
