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> One thing I am curious about ? does Flare support the
> sharing of topics among multiple authors?
The topics are simple XML files and can be stored wherever you want. I
have them on the server (for backup reasons). An issue would be if
multiple users edit the same topic at the same time. Only using it
(without editing) should be no problem. However, this would be an unsafe
method. As I mentioned, Flare can be used together with source control
of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). With this, you check out
files that you want to edit (copying it to a local folder). Checked out
files appear locked for other users. After you have edited them, you
check the files in and other users can access them again. I do not need
this feature, because I am the only author in my company, so I don't
have really used it, but I tried it out and found it easy to use.
(Right-click a topic and click a command to check it out/in.) I don't
know about the costs of TFS, but afaik it is an often used tool in
software development, so it might be already available in some
companies.
[By the way: If somebody else has more experience with TFS, I would like
comments on that, especially what you could do with it regarding
authoring TFS besides checking files in/out - going back to older
versions, tagging files for translation?]
>Also, how are the snippets in Flare saved?
They are saved in small single XML files. You can set up different
(cascaded) folders for organizing the snippets. That's exactly what I do
- having subfolders such as "print" or "productA" for snippets that
appear only in certain outputs. In theory, you could directly tag single
snippets or whole snippet folders with conditions - unfortunately, there
is still a bug so that this does not work. I hope it will be fixed
sooner or later J
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