Re: Document! X Review process

Richard Sloggett (Innovasys) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:07:36 GMT

Have you come across our Community Extensions product? It's a companion to Document! X and HelpStudio that allows you and your users (or reviewers) to add private notes, public comments and ratings against topics in the help systems you create. As well as the functionality in the output you create, it includes a set of management tools integrated right in to the Document! X and HelpStudio Applications for reviewing, moderating, editing and deleting the community content.

It's ideal for reviewing, as the Community Content (i.e. review comments in your case) is visible not only in the output but also whilst you are editing and from a summary list integrated right into Document! X and HelpStudio. From the summary list you can just click to open the related topic for edit - a really quick and easy way to action comments. Comments can be marked as read, or edited so that you can track progress or mark them actioned.

You can activate the community features in your projects in the Document! X Project Editor or in the HelpStudio Build Profile Editor. There is an evaluation server we run that enables you to try the features without having to set anything specific up, and a license for installing your own Community Extensions server (an ASP.NET 2.0 web application) is free to users with a team license.

You can find more out about Community Extensions, and explore some sample content with the Community Features, here:
http://www.innovasys.com/products/ce/overview.aspx

Document! X Review process

BMeyer — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:42:14 GMT

We are in the process of using Document! X to document a very extensive API collection for our customers. We've gotten to the point where we have the output builds in CHM format. As we have blazed this new documentation trail for our customers, we have had to think a little differently about our traditional Tech Pubs workflow to accommodate this very customer-friendly help interface. Now we seem to be at a loss as to how to handle the traditional process of reviews. Our traditional methods lead us down the path of commentable PDFs to get feedback/changes/revisions from our subject matter experts (SME). But, outputting from Document! X (or Help Studio) does not allow the PDF output solution (or at least make it easy). We can print the CHM to the Acrobat Printer, but, that does a very ugly job of converting the content into a page-by-page document.

I looking for any suggestions that may help us think of other ways to maybe solve this Tech Pubs process dilemma.