Re: tools: RoboHelp X5 vs WebWorks Publisher for Word

Subject: Re: tools: RoboHelp X5 vs WebWorks Publisher for Word
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 15:30:23 -0500




Wendy Cunningham wrote:

Some are comfortable with complex software, but some only
know Word.

ROFLMAO!

Wendy, Word is one of the most complex [unnecessarily complex] pieces of software any of us is likely ever to encounter.

But, getting back to what you are asking for, if you want people of various levels of skill to be able to add material to your intranet without the intervention of a human editor, my first choice is giving them Web forms to fill in, with their submitted form entries added to a database in such a way that new Web pages are generated from them and linked as appropriate to their departments and what-not. This entail a modest amount of Web programming, but it is not inordinately difficult to implement.

I built such an intranet site, and people were much happier with it than with the site's earlier incarnation. The earlier version required that each department designate someone to, first, attend a series of training sessions and, subsequently, be responsible for maintaining the department's pages.

The version I built consisted of some canned page templates that I created, plus a wizard. Anyone in the company could use the wizard to create a new page or modify an existing page and specify what existing pages should display links to it. I provided some flexibility in terms of the kinds of information they could add to a page, but mostly a page consisted of one or more headings, one or more paragraphs, and placeholders where document links could be listed under the headings. My wizard inserted HTML comments to indicate who created or modified a page and when. They could also upload documents to the site (my script assigned unique identifiers to all documents so that valid files would not be overwritten) and indicate where such documents should be listed (what pages, under what subheadings on those pages).

In your situation, you would probably want to include an authorization check to ensure that only specific individuals could add pages on behalf of a given department.

The advantage of a system like this is that anybody can type into a form on a Web page, and there is no way they can break the site.


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tools: RoboHelp X5 vs WebWorks Publisher for Word: From: Wendy Cunningham

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