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

rebecca officer rebecca.officer at alliedtelesis.co.nz
Sun Jun 24 23:02:53 PDT 2012


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?
 
Many thanks
Rebecca
 
 
 
 

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