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I'm an IT Admin at a small business (100 users) with 4 offices spread over
300kms. I also have graphics and web design experience, plus many years of
writing for newspapers and magazines. The last software manual I did was 500
pages and built in Pagemaker...nowadays, I'm pretty good with using Content
Management Systems, WIKIs and so on, but I haven't used a HATT in a long
time.
I've been given the task of rebuilding the company's procedures and policies
documents. Currently they comprise bundles of PDFs residing in directories
or uploaded to our copy of Kayako SupportSuite (a good PHP/MySQL ticketing
system which includes a rudimentary Knowledgebase, a Troubleshooting Wizard
and a Downloads archive). Our business is very reliant on IT. Mobile
workforce, PDAs, proprietary web portals and frequent turnaround of jobs
under high pressure deadlines. It is important that new employees learn
fast. I need to build better induction tools and make it easier to find
information.
SupportSuite is a great tool, but it cant fulfil our needs with respect to
user docs. I want to provide a better service to the users and create a
system which is responsive to change and updates. To this end, I've built a
clean, simple Joomla based intranet to wrap SupportSuite and contain
additional help content. Although Joomla is a good CMS, I'd prefer to use a
HATT to create the help-related content and then export that content for use
in a variety of formats (for example, I can wrap a Help & Manual WebHelp
project into Joomla using an iframe)
We are about to evaluate Help & Manual, as this tool seems priced within our
reach and offers easy concurrent user authoring. It also seems fairly
intuitive, a critical aspect given I will be delegating a bunch of the work
to clerical staff who I'll have to train beforehand. I also like the choices
of output formats....and I'm able to grok the xml used during construction.
If our evaluation goes according to plan, we will use Help & Manual as the
dominant documentation tool.
In Visio 2007 we have built two complex flowcharts comprising the dominant
workflows in the business. Each workflow comprises a sequence of
events/tasks. Each task is comprised of procedures. I'm wanting to
graphically incorporate the flowcharts into the help structure, in a manner
which will allow the user to drill down through the flowchart into
individual procedures.
In days gone by, I would have done this with an image map in a static html
website. Things have changed a lot since then and I don't know the
quickest/smartest method or tool I should deploy to achieve my desired
outcome. I also don't know if it is a job which suits the capabilities of
Help & Manual.
Any tips or suggestions regarding the above would be appreciated.
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