Syncing Between the Project Manager and Resource Manager: Best Practices?

[Midacol]

Hello-

A colleague and I have just started creating product documentation for our company via RoboHelp 11. We have created a set of topics on a network location and have connected to that location via our Resource Manager. We are making edits to topics located on our own C: drives via the Project Manager and attempting to keep our topics up to date via the syncing function by sending our topic edits to the Resource Manager topics and downloading newly edited topics from the Resource Manager to our local drives.  However, we do have a couple of questions.

For example, in the diagram, if my colleague edits a few topics locally and then syncs with the Resource Manager, I see those topics with the red "x" icon (1) indicating my topics in my Project Manager (4) are out of sync. I can see the changes my colleague has made to the topic she synced with the Resource Manager (2) and I can open my own copy of the topic on my C: drive with the now out of sync text (3) but the only way we can see to sync my own Project Manager topics with the Resource Manager topics is to right-click on each individual changed topic in the Resource Manager and select the Sync option one at a time.

Question A: Is there any way to mass sync all of the out of sync topics in my Project Manager with the newly edited topics in the Resource Manager with one action so that my own local topics will be updated and in sync with our shared topics in the Resource Manager?

Question B: What does the "Auto update local project resources" setting (5) do?  Is this the solution I am looking for in my Question A?  We are not sure what it does at this point and could use a pointer or two.

Thank you-

Michael

[Peter Grainge]

The fact that you have posted this question in Source Control suggests you think Resource Manager can be used for two authors to work on one project. It is not meant for such use and I wouldn't use it for that purpose. As one of you updates a topic, internal files get updated but only on one machine so it will not be long before cracks appear.

You need to use proper source control for that purpose. I will leave it to others to help you on that.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Midacol]

Peter-

Thanks for your response. I'm glad to learn we need to find some other approach for two authors to share one RH project before we allowed this practice to continue. However, I now find that I have no idea what the proper solution would be and I have no idea where to begin.

Can you suggest where I may begin to look for another solution or whom I may ask?

Thank you-

Michael

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Michael.

There are a number of source control applications out there that you can use. Most of them can be integrated with your RoboHelp projects, although you don't have to do this. The idea of integrating with RH means that only those files you need to change are "locked" to prevent others from changing them. This is handled from directly inside RH. We adopt the second approach with is to manually "lock" the files outside of RH. We prefer the greater level of control that this provides.

In order to integrate a source control application with RH requires some setup, but this differs depending on the application being used. For example, Tortoise SVN requires a plugin to be installed. They all rrequire a backend database which normally requires a server. Your IT peeps should be able to help there.

Source Control applications include Tortoise SVN, Perforce, Team Foundation Server but there are many others.

[Guest]

Midacol,

Are you documenting a program/product or just using RH to do online documentation?

If it is a program/product maybe you can use the Source Control they are using.

If it is online documentation, does your company use SharePoint? That is an option for source control and multi-author editing that is an end-to-end workflow solution.

Good luck.

Bill