Options for Publishing RoboHelp 10 Content in SharePoint 2010

[Ted_Engel1]

I’m a SharePoint 2010 administrator and RoboHelp user who would welcome the help of anyone – Adobe employee or otherwise.

We’re about to launch a SharePoint subsite to house our process and procedure documents. It's a simple setup - the site uses a single document library to hold the processes, procedures, and their supporting documents. We've also created a search scope to limit our users to results from the same library to ensure they only receive approved, up-to-date content.

RoboHelp is a natural fit for our process-procedure hierarchy, and I suspect it might be ideal for making this information easy to find and easy to use in an attractive, unified format that doesn’t require multiple sign-ons.

Adobe’s RoboHelp 10 datasheet refers to “publish[ing] a single continuous HTML page directly to SharePoint by combining SharePoint GUI features and RoboHelp topics.” Other Adobe documentation shows what looks to be a complete Help file published within a SharePoint site.

Based on what I've read, I'll guess we can create the content in RoboHelp 10 and then publish it on to our subsite (likely the document library I mentioned) as either a compiled Help file or as individual .aspx files -- one for each process and procedure.

I’d be grateful for any information and best practices you'd share.

Thank you!

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

RoboHelp 10 integrates with SP in several way. Two of the most important ones are that you can use SP as a source control (version control) system for you RoboHelp project and that you can publish your projects to SP in ASPX-format.

With the Multiscreen HTML5 output, you can integrate your RoboHelp output with your SP-site. RoboHelp publishes APSX, CSS, images and JS to a library and folder of your choosing. You can then call the help to show your output within you SP skin. You can choose how the RoboHelp output should be integrated with SharePoint. You can view only the help content or use an SP Master Page if you want to retain your heading, links, etc.

If you want multiple outputs, it may be best to create a library and add every output in a folder in that library. Then add a link to the start page so user can view the content. I would not recommend showing the library to users as they will be confronted with RoboHelp output where they have to select the correct file themselves. Best just to add a couple of links on the subsite’s main view.

Greet,

Willam

[Ted_Engel1]

Hello William,

Thank you for your reply - I appreciate it a great deal.

Your answer leads me to believe the best answer is to publish a compiled Help file to a document library, and I'm almost certain that's the right approach. I plan on testing RoboHelp over the next few days, but I assume the Adobe documentation that shows the Adobe Policies and Procedures file within a SharePoint site illustrates this. I'm guessing the user created the file, published it to a SharePoint site's library, and then used a Web Part to show the content.

My challenge is that the supporting documents I mentioned in my first message are typically PDF documents. If I publish the Help file to a single document library, can I use content types or another method to house the PDF files in the same library?

I'd welcome any advice you or anyone else might offer about my guesses as to how RoboHelp and SharePoint integrate!

Kind regards,

Ted

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

To get the same effect as in the example, you don't need a web part. When you generate your output from RoboHelp, you can select a master page. When you open a page from the output, the master page (header, sidebar, etc) controls what you see aside the conent.

Greet,

Willam