Need advice regarding converting

[Aurora Tech Writer]

About 2 years ago I inherited the "help authoring" responsibilities from a coworker that left our company. The help system that I inherited is a winhelp based system.

Since Microsoft has decided to leave winhelp behind with the launch of Vista...I now have to recommend to my bosses on what direction to take in terms of converting from winhelp to something that is more "futureproof".

Also, to give you some more to chew on in terms of the mindset of my bosses...I am still using Robohelp X3...so I am also trying to justify the expense of upgrading to RH6.

Any advice that anyone can offer would be helpful thanks.

-JC

[Captiv8r]

Hi JC and welcome to our community

First off, don't panic. You said:
Since Microsoft has decided to leave winhelp behind with the launch of Vista...

Are you sitting down? If not, sit down. Take a deep relaxing breath, then read the rest.

WinHelp is not dead and does continue to work in Vista. They just made it more painful. 16 bit WinHelp files work straight away, while 32 bit WinHelp files will require downloading the 32 bit WinHelp display engine from Microsoft.

It's true that they really do want everyone to move away from WinHelp. So you are right to consider moving in a new direction. But you don't need to do it now or lose all help capabilities.

Cheers... Rick

[Aurora Tech Writer]

Rick thanks for the input...however Microsoft's workaround is not the most user friendly. As I understand it, I as a software developer cannot redistribute the winhelp 32 executable to my clients. They would have to download it and then install it manually for every workstation that uses our software. Perhaps I should have added that to my original post to explain part of my reasoning for converting...

[Linux Rules]

Hello JC -

If you can wait for a while, hold tight until RoboHelp 7 is released.

WebHelp is a very good direction to go, especially for cross platform ability and ease of updating.

BUT (there always is a "but") RH6/5/2002 use Kadov tags in the code which is NOT desirable (not being a troll, just do a search and read the discussions). RH7 will do away with these tags.

If you must convert to a Web based system before RH7 is released, you may want to check competing products. I had to do this quite a while ago on another project and went with HyperText Studio 5 (Olson Software) as we couldn't wait for RH7.

Regards,
GEWB