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A
Anonymous
September 26, 2008
Question

RoboHelp vs. SharePoint as Help Authoring Tool

  • September 26, 2008
  • 13 replies
  • 5222 views
Hello All,

I'm currently looking at RoboHelp to replace our old help guides. Right now our guides are accessed though a 2 frame page with an asp driven TOC on the left. The TOC just links to some html pages that display in the right fram and others that are just downloads of word, excel and PDF docs.

We will be purchasing Microsoft SharePoint next year and it has been suggested to use that as our help authoring tool. I don't know much about RoboHelp (other than I've been using the demo for a couple days and love it's ease of use) and SharePoint and was wondering if anyone out there has used both as a help authoring tool and what your experiences were.

Are they pretty much similar, does anyone use them in conjunction, any pros and cons to each?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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    13 replies

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    RoboColum_n_
    RoboColum_n_
    Legend
    September 26, 2008
    Hi mschallmo and welcome to the RH community.

    Microsoft SharePoint isn't a help authoring tool. It's a document management system. You'd still need to have some application to produce the help output to host in SharePoint. As you have discovered, the RoboHelp interface is very user friendly so why not use that ;-)
    A
    Anonymous
    September 26, 2008
    Welcome to the forums. My colleague, Tom Johnson, posted on his blog about his experience trying out SharePoint as a help system. His comments may be helpful to you. (While his preference is Flare, in your case RoboHelp would have been the choice here.) But you may not be trying to all the things he was trying to do.

    Hope this helps,

    Ben
    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    September 26, 2008
    Welcome to our community, mschallmo

    I'm not a Sharepoint user and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I can't claim to be one.

    I think you are comparing Spiders to Hedgehogs here. RoboHelp is a Help Authoring Tool (HAT). Sharepoint is a product that might display what RoboHelp created, but will not facilitate actually creating the content you would later display as RoboHelp will.

    Unless someone more experienced with Sharepoint steps up to refute this, my understanding is that you would need Both RoboHelp AND Sharepoint. RoboHelp to author the content and Sharepoint to present it to your users.

    Cheers... Rick
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