XML-based Help Authoring tools for customized help

["Karen Casemier" <karen -dot- casemier -at- provia -dot- com>]

If you've followed any of my messages over the last six months (and there haven't been that many, so don't feel bad if you ignored them!), my department is trying to implement an XML-based approach to help authoring in order to provide customized help for our users. Because our application is highly customizable, the ideal solution would be to dynamically generate the help based on the individual user's configuration (so even different users at the same customer site could be potentially viewing different information for the same screen in the application).

That is still a hope for the future, but due to limited resources, we are going to have to take another approach right now. Because we are still hoping to implement an XML-based solution in the future, we'd like to take the first step now and start with an XML-based help authoring tool that would allow us to truly use the power of XML (I can't believe how many tools I've found that claim to be "XML" tools, but hide all the functionality of XML so it is basically a poor man's RoboHelp).

This is an example of what I'd like to be able to do with our source files:
Create a "field" element for all field definitions.
Assign an ID attribute to each field element.
If a client customizes their system to hide some of the fields, we can filter the XML content to exclude the fields (based on the ID attribute) that they have hidden. Basically, we would build the client a customized help system to match their unique configuration.

There are other pieces of data we'd like to use in a similar fashion. The key difference between our original approach and this approach is that the build is not done automatically/dynamically on the client's side, but we do the build manually and provide them with the customized help files to replace the default files installed on the system.

I know ArborText has a pretty powerful product, but I'm not sure if I would need more than just their Epic editor. Anyone using this product? We need to keep the cost down to something our manager is used to - around the cost of Frame or RoboHelp. Ideally, the tool would allow us to generate HTML-based help (we don't need Microsoft HTML compiled help) and the accompanying TOC/Index stuff straight from the tool itself, without having to use a secondary tool to do that (so it would clearly need to be a tool designed for help authoring, not just XML authoring).

I've searched both the TECHWR-L site and googled, but I haven't been able to find just what I'm looking for. Any ideas? Anyone doing anything like this?

TIA,

Karen Casemier

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