FrameMaker SME collaboration

[shawninvancouver]

Hello all,

I am seeking advice on documentation SME collaboration workflow.

The fly in the ointment for me is that I need to cover the following complications:

- My subject matter experts need the ability to add full text (rather than just comments and annotations) to my draft work

- They will not have access to FM, nor should they. They only need to edit text, add a paragraph or two, and perhaps even insert images (although not an absolute requirement)

- The SMEs are primarily working on Linux systems, so the solution needs to be OS agnostic

- Ideally, round-trip collaboration... meaning edits can be imported back into FM.

- Ideally, real-time collaboration... meaning that all collaborators can see each other's edits.

Is there any way to accomplish these goals with FM?

If not, wow!

Then what are my options... without loosing FM's powerful documentation building capabilities?

BTW, this video seems to imply that full text editing is allowed via PDF review, also round-tripping... but what about OS agnostic? Will the Linux PDF viewer allow the same editing? And what about real-time or near real-time collaboration?

FrameMaker 12: Enhanced PDF Review Cycle | FrameMaker 12 Features | Adobe TV

Thanks a lot,

Doug

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Structured or unstructured? Maybe you can use that mini-XML tool that FM12 has with it?

[shawninvancouver]

Thanks for your reply Jeff.

Structured will make collaboration far easier for the SMEs. But editing view doesn't need to be perfect... it just needs to provide a usable collaboration platform with a close enough approximation to the final published product. Given that, PDF editing is ideal.

Equally important, for my own sanity, "sending" the content to a review/collaboration platform needs to be automated. With the number of simultaneous documents my team works on, we can't be spending a lot of time, updating the collaboration documents.

This cannot be a difficult goal to achieve.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FM isn’t really built for heavy collaboration – and with your Linux SMEs, they would probably have to run some Win emulator to use FM or the FM XML editor tool. Maybe you need to think about a wiki model?

[shawninvancouver]

Jeff_Coatsworth wrote:

FM isn’t really built for heavy collaboration – and with your Linux SMEs, they would probably have to run some Win emulator to use FM or the FM XML editor tool. Maybe you need to think about a wiki model?

Wiki? There is no way to get content/images into a Wiki; AFAIK, there is no FM to Markup language converter. And even if there was, it would be an impossibly involved process to convert a document to Wiki's markup language.

How do you support collaboration? Surely, you don't work in a silo? Technical writing is highly reliant on collaboration.

I can't be the only technical writer that needs Linux based SMEs to edit draft content.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Wikis – sure there is – lots of people have moved their help content into a wiki model – in fact, STC New England is hosting a webinar this Wed. about one company that did just that!

Anyway, in my case I’m a lone writer working entirely in Windows – so using the PDF review method works just fine for me. I think in your case you’re going to need to shop around to look at lightweight XML editors that will work in your SME Linus environment. Once you’ve got that, you can always bring the XML back into FM.

[shawninvancouver]

Thanks for the STC tip; unfortunately, that webinar is more around permanently moving content to a wiki. I am "simply" seeking a convenient way to allow ongoing collaboration of documents that will eventually become published into large manuals.

Temporarily converting documentation to a wiki is not a round-trip process and the loss of document fidelity is far too great to be considered as anything more than a last resort.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Sorry, never intended to imply that it was a temp solution.

[shawninvancouver]

Thanks and no worries Jeff. I appreciate your input.

Hopefully, I will hear from others that are working in larger teams, like me.