RoboHelp project management strategy

Morning

I have some general questions, for which I doubt there are any "correct" answers, but I'm sure people will have useful to say all the same. First, some background information.

I have used RoboHelp before (version 😎 to manage a handful of small, disparate projects, but I have not used the software for a couple of years (which is probably the last time I used these forums, but under a different ID).

In my current role I manage around 400 hundred Word documents, from which I generate user guides as PDFs, spread across three or four software releases. There is not a lot of cross over between these guides, but there are a number of core pieces of functionality, which sometimes bleed into the other areas. I also manage some very basic online help pages, most of which are duplicates of what is in the Word docs. As it stands I have no single-sourcing and often changes in one version of a guide also need to be made to the other versions and the online help.

I am looking to streamline this system, by moving away from Word docs and using RoboHelp 10 instead. While my company has not decided precisely how they want to distribute documentation for future products, I am pretty confident I will need to continue to generate online help (for which customers will only get updates once a quarter) and stand alone PDFs.

Based on the quantity and content of the guides I have, I think each version of the software will need around 10,000 topics (and well over a 1,000,000 words), with maybe 5,000 image files. From this I will need to output selected text and images for the online help (which will be context sensitive) and around 100 PDFs. For now I will be managing this on my own, but I may need to work collaboratively with another tech author in the near future.

So that's the background, here are my questions:

1. Is it practical to put all of that into a single project?
2. Will future collaborative working require the documentation to be broken down into separate projects?
3. How easy is it to manage context sensitive help across multiple projects
4. We use Serena Dimensions for version control. Does RoboHelp 10 integrate with Dimensions effectively or will I need to also use RoboSource?
5. Our PDFs are heavily formatted and include the following:
   - a cover page
   - standard declaration and revision history page
   - contents page
   - mirrored headers/footers which include the document title, chapter heading, page number and copyright statement.
   - auto-numbered paragraphs, which swap to letters for the appendices.
   - a readers' comments section at the back
   - a rear cover.
   Is it possible to include all that in PDFs generated from RoboHelp content, in the same way you might from Word?
6. Am I assuming I will need to create a separate SSLfor each PDF I need to generate, each with its own TOC. Is that right?
7. Any general tips on managing different versions of the same documentation, several of which will be live at the same time?

Thanks in advance

DocBot (formerly Euromatt)