Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something ...

[John Sgammato]

I am working with MindTouch and their enterprise MindTouch TCS system (a step up from MindTouch Core). 
They still have some issues with my imports from (unstruct) FM10, although they have successfully imported other content from FM. Whatever they discover to solve my issues may trickle down to the Core product as well. In any event, I will post here what we find out. A reliable means of publishing from FM10 to a knowledgebase would be a Very Good Thing. 
john

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 2:02 PM
To: rebecca officer; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something ...

I've spent much of the past year trying to figure out a similar transition. Short answer, the tools aren't mature enough for a $20K budget. Long answer:

Confluence 4.x and MindTouch Core are the two wikis I've found that seem workable.

Migrating large amounts of existing FrameMaker content to either is problematic. Here's my most recent status report on my lack of success in bulk migration from FrameMaker to Confluence (my status with MindTouch is almost exactly the same):
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+4+further+discussion?focusedCommentId=294486511#comment-294486511

Version control is the other huge sticking point. Except for a few unusable prototypes, I have found no wiki with document-level version control a la branching in Subversion or Perforce. The Confluence docs team just makes a static copy of the current release for the next release. I'd really prefer to have a dynamic system where unchanged pages were shared across multiple versions of a document and branched as necessary.

"status tagging (e.g.> draft/final)": can be easily accomplished with native features

read-only access: native feature, but note license terms (MindTouch allows unlicensed read-only "community" users to post comments and rate pages, Confluence does not)

delivery as PDF: Confluence, if the native feature doesn't cut it you can use K15t Scroll (which also sells an ePub utility); MindTouch Core (which is itself free) uses Prince, which is excellent but not cheap.


AutoDesk has a hybrid system that does more or less everything you're talking about and more, but they spent a lot of money on it. The DITA XML source is stored in SDL Trisoft, which handles versioning and topic reuse. The tech writers author in XMetal. They use various tools to generate standard online help formats and PDFs. Those portions of the system were in place before they added the wiki.

MindTouch built them a connector that populates the MindTouch TCS wiki from Trisoft. They also have a connector that can pull user-contributed content back into Trisoft from MindTouch, though that requires some cleanup. The wiki can generate PDFs on the fly.

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 11:02 PM, rebecca officer <rebecca.officer at alliedtelesis.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> Our docs team (4 of us) creates a many-thousand-page multi-chapter 
> user manual in unstructured Frame. Lots of tables and cross-refs. 
> Conditional text used to publish several variants. Published as PDFs a 
> couple of times a year, delivered online.
>
> And the engineers (about 80) have a wiki that's a mish-mash of 
> internal feature development info, some of which ends up in the user manual.
>
> I've been asked to make the user manual and the internal docs use the 
> same source, which both writers and engineers would write. We want to 
> work collaboratively, stop duplicating effort and come much closer to 
> real-time updates.
>
> I'll need to include version control, content re-use, status tagging (e.g.
> draft/final), read-only access, and delivery as PDF and HTML. While 
> I'm at it, I'd like to do automated builds and publish ebooks.
>
> The engineers would like the wiki to be the source. The writers want 
> to stay with FM. I'm prepared to make everyone change tools (*grin*) 
> but only if we have to.
>
> As a complicating factor, the engineers are all on Linux. Getting an 
> FM licence per engineer would blow my budget (Adobe, how about selling 
> a site licence???), and they'd have to run it in Virtual Box. I'm not 
> seeing a happy ending there.
>
> I've got plenty of implementation time and can lay my mitts on a 
> programmer or two. Budget's not yet set but prob around $20K.
>
> So ...
>
> Does anyone know of a good tool for round-tripping Framemaker <--> Wiki?
>
> Should I be looking at XML?
>
> Any other thoughts on how I should tackle this?
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