Is it possible to build a help system that allows end users to add their own help?

[TechWriter77]

I'm not sure if this is possible, but what we want to do is basically combine all our help systems into one integrated help system. Our company has a lot of help in a variety of places:

• HTML Help/WebHelp
• Knowledge bases
• Wikis
• Blogs
• Word docs/PDFs

What we want to do eventually is to make it possible for users to add their own help, add feedback to topics and, naturally, we want everything moderated.

[RoboColum_n_]

This sounds like you need some sort of wiki. Technically I guess you could have a RH project with links to all these sources. It is also possible to use scripting for some of the other things you want but whether that is the best use of your resources is a question only you can ask. I'd also question whether a wiki is the best solution in the first place!

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[TechWriter77]

We looked into wikis, but the powers that be didn't like how cumbersome it was to navigate wikis right out of the box. I guess what I'm really wondering is if it would be possible to create something similar to RoboHelp's help, so that users have the option of searching both the "official" Adobe help, as well as the community help.

I did a little research, and it looks like Adobe uses a custom instance of Google to handle their search and Jive software for their online community. Then, I'm assuming they indexed everything using their Google appliance.

If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. Thanks!

[RoboColum_n_]

With RoboHelp 8 you can now include the contents of certain types of baggage files (e.g. .doc, .pdf) in your help files search results. That said, the search capabilities of RH ends with external content. Only internal content can be searched. Perhaps if you had a topic or series of topics that were little more than a series of links to external URLs this would suffice. If the topics were properly indexed this would make this easy to find.

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