Advice for Single-Source CMS Authoring Environment

[RHandel at emdeon.com]

I am presently on a tools research group to find a viable single-source
solution for creating help documentation for our software.  We have a
variety products, with newer product help documentation being more
online-centered and legacy documentation being more print-centered, so we
would like a solution that provides the best solution for both.

Presently, some of our team primarily uses RoboHelp, others primarily use
FrameMaker, while still others primarily use Word with Acrobat.  We want a
system that will allow us to expand and not lock us in, but the key to all
of this is the cleanest and easiest means to repurpose documentation (print,
web, internal, PDA, etc.).

I am still trying to wrap my brain around the way FrameMaker handles XML,
but it appears that it COULD function as a CMS itself.  However, I cannot
really find much information on this or how it handles the organization of
data on a server.

Can anyone give me feedback on using FrameMAker in this capacity?  Should I
see FrameMaker solely as an authoring tool?  And in either case, would it be
a good solution for authoring online help (i.e. is WebWorks as robust as
RoboHelp--or for that matter, will Adobe eventually integrate the two
products to make it a seamless process)?

Any help would be most appreciated.


Randolph Handel 
Technical Writer
Medical Manager Research & Development
Sage Software
15151 NW 99th Street ● Alachua, FL 32615 
Office: 386.418.7137 ● Fax: 386.418.1591
www.sagehealth.com

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