One other thought is to convert FrameMaker books into a web help system and deploy that to a web server that anyone in your company could access. That's a fairly simple exercise to do if you have the technical communication suite and I can provide a detailed explanation on how to do that if you are interested.
Joe On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Joseph Lorenzini <jalo...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi Laura, > > I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also > take a look at these: > > http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf > http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/ > > The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of > conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours. > > It doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of > what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case. > If all your manager wants to do is "make it easier to share our doc set > with people in the company", then instead of saying "XML authoring to the > rescue" I suggest that you think about *that* and what tools could best > achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else). > > From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring > would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing > significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a > large technical writing department, making a business case for structured > authoring will probably be hard. > > Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your "share content > with others" situation: > > - who in the company do you need to share the content with? > - If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then > why not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository > and have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content? > - If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the > content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are > enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS? > - If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company, > then why not look at using a wiki? > > Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper > than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your > current workflow. > > Any other questions, just let me know. > > Sincerely, > Joseph Lorenzini > > >
_______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
