Technical Communication

Adobe RoboHelp,HAT,Adobe Technical Communication Suite,Multi-authoring,Source Control,RoboSource Control,Merged Help

Adobe RoboHelp 7 has a great multi-authoring support. You can use a Source Control system to achieve the same. In my opinion it is the best way to achieve true multi-authoring. Alternatively, if you want to avoid the complexity of setting up a Source Control system, you may use the Merged Help feature of RoboHelp to achieve multi-authoring. However, I repeat – I strongly recommend using a Source Control as it provides added benefits:

• It gives you the flexibility of working on all the files in the project – true multi-authoring. Even two or more authors can work on the same file simultaneously. You may wish to restrict access by setting adequate permissions and/or setting an option for not letting two authors work on the same file.
• It also provides Version Management. You can retrieve older version of not just files and folders but even complete projects.

Multi-authoring using Source Control

Adobe RoboHelp 7 has an in-built support to connect to any Source Control that supports Microsoft Source Code Control Interface (MSSCCI) API. This includes most of the Source Control including RoboSource Control (which ships for free along with Adobe RoboHelp 7), Perforce, Visual Source Safe version 6 and 7 etc.

The most important characteristic of this integration is that RoboHelp shields the author from the complexity of the Source Control. An author will never require opening the Source Control program. He can manage most of the tasks like – Adding a project to the Source Control, Retrieving they latest version of the project or any of its older versions, checking the history of a file etc without leaving RoboHelp HTML application. RoboHelp HTML has a very friendly toolbar that can do all of this without the author leaving the authoring application. Apart from this, the application also keeps a track of files that get modified when you work on a project. If you are modifying existing files in a project, they will be automatically checked out, including project files like the ones used for storing Conditional Build tags, User Defined variables, Snippets etc. It also keeps a track of the new files that get created while you work on your project. And as soon as you close your project or application, it will ask you to check all the modified and newly added files into the Source Control program. Simple isn’t it.

Most of the Source Controls programs, including RoboSource Control provide the option of locking and / or notifying the author if a file is already in use or is being updated by another author. Some advanced Source Control systems, including RoboSource Control also allow the same file to be edited by multiple authors at the same time. However, in such a case, the one checking-in the file will have to make sure that he merges all the changes checked-in by another author. At times this could become tricky and thus I would recommend you to do so only if you are a power user. By default, this feature is turned off in RoboSource Control and it will lock a file if the same is being updated by an author.

If you have not looked at RoboSource Control, I would suggest that you give it a try right away. There is a very nice article on the RoboHelp Developer Center by Matthew Ellison that talks about how to set up and use RoboSource Control - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/robosource.html

Multi-authoring using Merged Help feature

Adobe RoboHelp has a very powerful feature, using which an author can set up merging of multiple smaller projects into one single project when the smaller projects are published in a specific folder structure. For the purpose of multi-authoring, you could do the reverse. Meaning thereby, that a single mammoth project can be split into smaller projects in such a way that an author gets to work on an independent help project. The beauty of this feature is that, after you set up the system, you do not have to collaborate with any of the other authors. You can publish your part of the project independent of the other authors. When you publish, the system is smart enough to make changes to just your part of the project without affecting the other part of project. Pretty neat isn’t it.

Multi-authoring is a very powerful feature and providing multi-authoring support is just a small part of it. I will cover it in more detail some other day.

Posted by Akshay Madan at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RoboHelp,Adobe AIR,Future of Online Help,HAT,Innovation,Technical Communication Suite,Adobe

Five weeks ago, I posted on RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and I started with " If you want to know more about the future of Online Help in Web 2.0 world, you may want to check out the Public Beta of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR."  It was a brave statement and I was preparing for a long and extended period of evangelism around Adobe AIR and why it is the most preferred format for your Online Help.  However, events have overtaken us. 

At the Writers UA Conference two weeks ago, Adobe AIR was a great hit.  Within 3 weeks of the public Beta announcement, almost everyone at the conference was talking about the possibilities Adobe AIR provides as a vehicle for delivering Online Help.  Throughout the conference, a number of experts, consultants and trainers whom we closely work with - John Daigle, Matt Sullivan, Alan Houser, Kevin Siegel, Rick Stone, Peter Grainge, Rob Houser, Tony Self and hundreds of conference participants endorsed the vision of Adobe AIR.  We held additional sessions to provide details on RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and two of the four pundits on the panel mentioned Adobe AIR as the future of user assistance.  I had no doubt in my mind that Adobe AIR is the future of Online Help, what's amazed me is the speed at which everyone in user assistance community has embraced Adobe AIR.

If you are one of the few, who have not yet downloaded the free public beta from Adobe Labs, please do so and let us know your feedback.

Posted by at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe RoboHelp,Adobe RoboHelp Server,Adobe Technical Communication Suite,HAT,WritersUA,RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR

I am just back from the WritersUA conference. As usual the conference was nice - we had some great sessions, good food and a lot of fun.  As I had mentioned in the previous post, we had John Daigle, Peter Grainge and Rick Stone as RoboHelp experts and Matt Sullivan as FrameMaker expert. 

I was surprised when two out of the three pundits in the closing session concluded that Adobe AIR is the future. However, that gave me satisfaction as we were able to show the power of Adobe AIR through Beta of RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR.

I thank everyone for showing interest in RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. We had a number of requests both at the booth and in the conference sessions. We did a couple of sessions about Adobe AIR and RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR and got some great feedback. For those of you, who have not got a chance to attend WritersUA, should go ahead and do a free download of the same from //labs.adobe.com/technologies/robohelp and participate in developing this product by providing feedback on the forum on the same web page.

The best part of using the packager is that it accepts WebHelp output produced by either Adobe RoboHelp 6 or Adobe RoboHelp 7 to generate an .air file. You do not have to do anything technical or write code. All you need to do is to go through a conversion wizard which has three screens in total. You can rip apart the WebHelp UI and package the actual content with a new modern looking UI. Packager provides you with an option of picking up from a set of absolutely different looking UI.

Thanks everyone for making this conference a memorable one.

- Akshay

Posted by Akshay Madan at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RoboHelp,Adobe AIR,Technical Communication,Technical Communication Suite,Online Help,HAT,CHM,Packager,Adobe

If you are publishing online help for Windows Vista (or one of the platforms you publish to is Windows Vista), you may want to consider using the Unipane skin from RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR.  Here is a Captivate Demo of what the output from this skin looks.  The help project used is the help file for RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (you can download it from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/robohelp/.

If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.

Posted by at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe RoboHelp,Adobe Technical Communication Suite,HAT,Conference,WritersUA

It’s been some time that we have been communicating through this blog. We have an opportunity - if you happen to be attending WritersUA Conference, do make sure that you drop by Adobe booth, and meet me in person.  I am happy to announce that we shall have Peter Grainge, John Daigle, Rick Stone, Matt Sullivan apart from the Adobe Team. You shall find these names familiar as they are active on Adobe Forums, and probably this is one such opportunity where you can put a face to these names, again at the Adobe booth.

There would be two Conference Sessions by Adobe:

• Introducing Technical Communication Suite on Monday 17th March at 1:15 PM, and
• Vendor Technical Presentation on March 18th.

Apart from the in conference sessions, we shall have demonstrations every day in the Adobe Meeting Room:

• RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR - Presentation by Akshay Madan (2pm to 2.30pm)
• Flare to RoboHelp Converter - Presentation by John Daigle (2.30pm to 3pm)
• Adobe Community Experts - Project Consultation (3pm to 4pm)

In case you would like to gather information about Adobe Technical Communications Suite, Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe RoboHelp Server, RoboSource Control, RoboScreenCapture, Captivate, FrameMaker, Acrobat or any other Adobe Product, please drop by our booth.

This time we have a new concept introduced by Peter called “Stick It”. They describe it as:

“If you have a RoboHelp problem that's hard to diagnose it helps if we can actually load the project and take a look. Peter says, if you're stuck, "Stick It!". Ah that charming British humor. What he is suggesting is that you bring your RoboHelp Project on a Memory Stick and we'll be glad to take a look and maybe solve any thorny problems you might be having.” – Source HATT list.

Also, if you have any problems, suggestions, enhancement requests regarding Adobe RoboHelp / Adobe RoboHelp Server or other Technical Communications Suite products, you are more than welcome to set up a meeting with me, so that we can talk about them in detail.

Last, but not the least, do not miss the Adobe sponsored Networking Mixer on Monday.

See you in Portland.

Posted by Akshay Madan at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe RoboHelp,MadCap Flare,Adobe Technical Communication Suite,Converter,transition,upgradeFlare to RoboHelp Migration

As you all know, RoboHelp experienced some turbulent times in the past while it was with Macromedia. I believe RoboHelp was declared “Dead” in one of the WritersUA conference. This led some of RoboHelp customers to migrate to other products and most importantly MadCap Flare as it was positioned as a replacement for RoboHelp. But as soon as Adobe got hold of RoboHelp and Captivate, things changed. We could clearly see we had all the products (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat) that a Technical Communicator would ever need and hence that led to creation of a brand new Suite – Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Since Adobe RoboHelp is one of the main applications in this suite, we have invested heavily in the same and have released two versions of the same. The last version – Adobe RoboHelp 7 is considered as the biggest release in the history of the product.

While we were developing products and gearing up for the Technical Communication suite, we attended a number of conferences and met a number of Technical Communicators – the actual users of the products. One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. We wanted to help these customers come back to RoboHelp, but at the same time we did not want to invest in writing this piece of code as it was targeted at a very small community. We also did a survey and posted a blog to gauge interest and size of this community (refer blog posted by Vivek Jain - Migrating from Flare to RoboHelp). We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007.  All of this led us not to invest in this space.

However, John Daigle of Evergreen Online Learning, LLC has worked on a utility that can help this small community of customers (existing Flare users who want to come back RoboHelp). It is available free of cost and can be downloaded by filling just 6 form entries. You can get one from here - http://www.showmethedemo.com/flare-to-robohelp/flare-to-robohelp.htm.

Though John did apprise me that he was working on a utility and asked me to answer some simple questions from time to time, but I never asked and he never shared what exactly he was doing. But when I saw this working today, I was completely amazed at how easy, simple and fast it is. So if you are a Flare customer and want to convert your project to a RoboHelp, all you need to do is, download the converter utility (1 minute job) and specify the Flare project that you want to convert and provide a name of the new RoboHelp project and press OK (another 1 minutes) and you are done. Double click the RoboHelp project (the .xpj file) and you are up and running. If that was not enough, he has another gift for you - he is providing the source code of this utility to the end customers under Common Public License again free of cost.

I will now be able to greet Long Beach and STC Minneapolis customers who had asked for a migration path with a smile on my face – Welcome BACK to RoboHelp. And this won’t have happened without John’s initiative. I personally thank John for investing in this converter business and working for the RoboHelp Community.

- Akshay

Posted by Akshay Madan at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

RoboHelp,Technical Communication,HAT,Online Help,Technical Communication Suite

RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Beta) enables you to generate Adobe AIR based Online Help by packaging WebHelp output from Adobe RoboHelp 6 and Adobe RoboHelp 7.  The Captivate Demo below illustrates the final output for an Adobe RoboHelp 7 sample project - Customer Care.  In this demo, I have captured the multi-tab features in the Accordion skin for Adobe AIR, mini-TOC, ability to add comments and favorites, and enhanced search.

If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.

Posted by at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)