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.
Hi All
I have been tasked with creating a secure, centralized portal for my organizationâs product documentation. This site is primarily for our customers, but employees may also need to login to access product documentation.ÂÂ
The people I have polled identified Mulesoft (https://docs.mulesoft.com/), ServiceNow (https://docs.servicenow.com/), SalesForce (https://help.salesforce.com), MapR (https://maprdocs.mapr.com/home/), and DataStax (http://docs.datastax.com) as sites that they like.
I have the usual requirements (users must log in, responsive layouts, ability to search content, ability to either generate a PDF on the fly or print/download a PDF, etc.). Currently about 80% of our documentation is in unstructured FrameMaker, 10% in RoboHelp, and 10% in Word.Â
One of my development teams would like to see everything moved to Markdown and stored in GitHub. Earlier this year I converted a FrameMaker document that used conditional text to Markdown and it was extremely time consuming. In addition, I had to rely on developers to create pre and post processing scripts to mimic the show/hide conditional text settings in FrameMaker and my work was stalled by the pull request process that we have in place.ÂÂÂI am a lone writer supporting multiple solutions that run on various platforms; I don't see Markdown as a viable solution for all of our documentation.Â
I have looked at numerous solutions and all seem to have their pros and cons. Is there a solution that would be best for a lone writer who will be solely responsible for implementing and maintain the portal? I have the budget to hire a consultant to get the project rolling and provide training, but otherwise I will be on my own.
Does anyone have any experience with selecting a solution? Thoughts to share regarding lessons learned when embarking on such a project? Is there a perfect solution out there or do I just need to pick the solution that best matches my requirements and find workarounds to achieve my desired results?
I'm on digest so it will take me a while to respond to any questions.
Thank you in advance for your guidance,Â
Britt
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Visit TechWhirl for the latest on content technology, content strategy and content development | http://techwhirl.com
