[Framers] Advice on slimming down a guide; customized guides per customer??

[Caroline Tabach]

Hi,

I have converted the very large Word user guide to FrameMaker.  I am using
Unstructured Frame 2017

This is a guide for a product which has general information about how to
use the product at the beginning, and a few chapters with general
information at the end.



The product is made up of  100 "boxes" which belong to 5 families  (I am
just calling them boxes for the sake of the example)

The FrameMaker book I made uses only chapters, not volumes, there is a
chapter for each box family, with information about each of the boxes in
that family.

Each customer only needs to user 4 or 5 "boxes", so we want to make user
guides that are smaller and more focused

I have made a book with everything in it, and now I want to show the SME
how we can use Frame to make smaller guides. I am wondering about the best
way to do this.

1. Make 5 books each with one box family in it, which will contain info
about all the boxes in that family as well as the general information. end
users will receive the guide with info about the box family, they will have
info about 15 boxes even if they only bought one

2. Redo the guide that I did and make the box families to be volumes, and
then each box is a chapter. .

This means it will be easy to add or remove boxes from the guide, this also
means it is possible to customize the guides per customers
The company are using heading numbering, so this means redoing all of the
heading of all the paragraph styles, which might get complicated

3. Another idea I had was to set the book up as described above, with a
chapter for each box family, but to have each box as a text inset, and be
able to create user guides per box. Highly customizing this, but means I
don't have to mess with the numbering, but maybe this will make life
complicated

What would you recommend?

Are there advantages and disadvantages of each method?

Thanks for your ideas

-- 
Caroline Tabach
Technical/Marcom Writer
e-mail: caroline.tabach at gmail.com