Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

One other thought is to convert FrameMaker books into a web help system and
deploy that to a web server that anyone in your company could access.
That's a fairly simple exercise to do if you have the technical
communication suite and I can provide a detailed explanation on how to do
that if you are interested.

Joe

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Joseph Lorenzini <jaloren at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Laura,
>
> I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
> take a look at these:
>
> http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
> http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/
>
> The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
> conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.
>
>  It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
> what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
> If all your manager wants to do is "make it easier to share our doc set
> with people in the company", then instead of saying "XML authoring to the
> rescue" I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
> achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).
>
> From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
> would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
> significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
> large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
> authoring will probably be hard.
>
> Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your "share content
> with others" situation:
>
>    - who in the company do you need to share the content with?
>    - If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then
>    why not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository
>    and have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
>    - If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
>    content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
>    enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
>    - If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company,
>    then why not look at using a wiki?
>
> Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
> than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
> current workflow.
>
> Any other questions, just let me know.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joseph Lorenzini
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20120324/28932337/attachment.htm>