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

[Georg Eck]

Hi Rebecca,

there is WebWorks ePublisher (Trial:
http://www.webworks.com/Tour/Try_ePublisher) with 
several output formats like: CHM, REVERB, Eclipse Help, ... and Wiki
like Media Wiki, MoinMoin and Confluence.

Input formats could be MS-Word, Adobe FrameMaker and DITA.

We are also SW-Vendor and the authors write in FrameMaker (DITA),
generate content in a Wiki 
(sample:
http://www.make-a-muffin.de/wiki/index.php/SQUIDDS-TB_de-Sonderzeichen.x
ml - here in German)
and after released we generate an online-help format with WebWorks
ePublisher too 
(sample:
http://www.finalyser.com/help/#page/Finalyser%2520Online-Help/special_ch
aracters.xml.26.1.html - here in English)

Note: There are different results from WebWorks ePublisher for the
different wiki formats.

-          Georg

 

 

Your question: Single sourcing from Frame and a wiki ... or something
...

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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