How Can I Manage Topic Statuses and Workflow (RoboHelp 8)

[Guest]

I'm the sole RoboHelp author in a company with a project lifecycle that didn't require me to work concurrent Help updates. I had time to finish an update and publish before starting work on another. Now I have multiple projects hitting my desk that need to publish on differing schedules.

My question is, how can I more effectively manage my workflow? For example, I currently need to publish a Help update for Project 1 that only impacts two topics; however, I have updates for three existing topics in review for Project 2 that doesn't rollout for three more weeks. If I generate an update for Project 1 now, my Project 2 topics that I don't want to publish yet will be included in the compiled file. How can I manage this situation?

It looks like I can set a topic status. Currently, all my topics use the default "In Progress" status. Should I set all my topics to "Complete" and reserve "In Progress" and "Ready for Review" for those that I'm working on for my various projects? Would it enable me to publish completed topics for Project 1 and default to the original content for the three Project 2 topics I status as "In Progress" or "Ready for Review?" As I noted, I don't want Project 2 updates to compile with Project 1, but do want their original content to be included in the file until such time as I'm ready to release the updates.

Thanks

[Guest]

Hello,

publish your

after what I have understood from your query is that you would like to do multiple jobs on a single project, i.e. breaking it down to many topics and allow yourself to be able to work concurrently or one at a time.

So, I would suggest you to use RoboSource Control and it allow you to control the version of you preoject i.e, you can publish your project over a server and either you go ahead youself and edit and modify tioics individually or you can allow multiple users to work on theor own a topic or so and then merge them together as a single project.

Hopefully this would be able to help you out!

Thanks,

Anjaneai

[Peter Grainge]

I'm not clear how source control will help here. I believe the problem is about working on topics that are not to be included in an output. This is achieved by using conditional build tags. Apply a tag of say WIP to topics and content that is not ready to be generated. When the help is generated, apply a build expression of Not WIP.

Source control would only be necessary if there is more than one person working on the project.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge