Customizing Online Help and versioning

Report · Nov 18, 2011

Hello all!

The Online Help my team creates supports a software application that is almost 100% customizable by our clients. Therefore, different clients may need documentation/help for their customized modules, which would not be delivered with base Online Help.

That being said, I'm wondering how versioning would work. If a customer wants to add on to our base Online Help and we delivered to our customers our base files, how could we control versioning? For example, if we delivered Online Help files for the 7.4.0 release of our software and customers purchase their own RoboHelp license to add their own content, what would happen to their new content when we deliver the Online Help files for the next release of our software? Everything would be overwritten, correct?

The only way I can think to do this is to recommend to our customers who want to add on to our base Online Help that they store their customized files outside of the base Online Help folder structure and manually reimport the files when we deliver new help files. Which seems like a lot of work.

Any idea would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!

Report · Nov 18, 2011

You describe a really strange scenario here - it's not a normal occurrence for the recipients of help to have to "roll their own" help package. Are your clients already using RH to build their own help system? I'd be a bit cheesed off if I had to invest in a copy of RH just to be able to add stuff.

As far as versioning goes, you'd be giving them the raw RH project each time; then they'd have to add their own topics from their previous version to your newly distributed one. Nothing would be overwritten if the new project was unpacked into its own folder.

Report · Nov 18, 2011

We delivered our customers a fully functioning Online Help system that they install with their application. However, many customers want to be able to add their specific business scenarios and steps into their Help. Since we have way too many customers to keep up with this ourselves, it is the customers' responsibility to add their own content.

In the past, our Documentation team used Webworks, and, as I understand it, there was some sort of plug-in that customers could purchase to add their own content to help files that we delivered. I'm just wondering if there is some way to accomplish this now that we have converted to RoboHelp.

Report · Nov 18, 2011

Not that I know of - you might look at delivering locally-installed AIRHelp; it's got commenting features (the browser-based one doesn't).

Report · Nov 18, 2011

Welcome to our community

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Cheers... Rick

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Report · Nov 21, 2011

Thanks, Rick! I'm interested in more information about KnowHow but the company's site appears to be in German. Any idea on how to more information in English?