Good day everyone,
For the last few years, my company has been working towards single-sourcing the documentation we create (e.g. user manuals and integrated program help) for all of our products. We have one big product and quite a few smaller products, with each one having its own user manual and integrated help. We use Adobe FrameMaker 11 and RoboHelp 10 to create and manage the content for our user manuals and integrated help respectively. We also use Perforce P4V for version control. Content typically is authored in FrameMaker first before being exported into RoboHelp as a .book file, which is then used to build our integrated help system.
Currently, half of our smaller products are single-sourced while the rest are curated by hand. We'd eventually like to have all of our products be single-sourced. However, even with the products that are already single-sourced, we're having some issues with how our authoring software interacts with our version-control software. We've also had problems converting back and forth between .FM and .MIF formats. My question here is two-fold.
First, what is a good workflow(s) for single-sourcing content using FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and version control software? Second, are there are other tools that we could use for such a workflow? For instance, there's been some consideration about switching from FrameMaker to MadCap Flare. What is MadCap Flare better at doing than FM for single-sourcing? What can be done to convert from using FM to MadCap Flare? What would be potentially lost in doing
such a switch? We've also been considering switch to the Adobe Creative Cloud, but before we make a decision one way or another, we'd like to nail these details down.
Any and all insight would be greatly appreciated. If further details are required, I'd be happy to give them to the best of my ability.