Wow, Andreas. Welcome to the Forums.
That's quite a laundry list!
The answers are pretty much, "yes", if I understand
correctly. That said, I don't know that much about CRMs, so your
mileage may vary.
To start, you might want to take a look at my article on the
Adobe Developer Network for an overall perspective.
Adobe
RoboHelp Server 6 improves the feedback loop
I view RoboHelp and RoboHelp Server as a "content" management
rather than a "document" management system though this is a bit a
semantics. Using variables, conditional build tags and Single
Source Layouts, you can manage the content of your output in a
fairly granular way (including to some level, your translation
issues).
In other words a team of multiple authors can manage the
content of a website in the way you describe with a combination of:
1. The authoring client (RoboHelp's main application) to
develop content and manage it.
2. RoboSource Control (for the check in, check out and
versioning you mentioned) where authoring content source material
is stored on a central server for backup and access by the team.
3. RoboHelp Server for managing the authentication of who has
access to the web server for publishing, etc. RoboHelp Server is an
Active Server Pages application running on IIS, typically with a MS
SQL Server or Oracle DB as the back end. As such, it uses Windows
Server straightforward authentication methods. When you set up the
author's project to publish to the server it will ask you for the
Username and Password. Once this is configured, it's seamless from
there. That login name/password can be the same as whatever you
call your single sign-on pair as long as it conforms to the Windows
Server scheme mentioned earlier.
The RoboHelp author who may be designated as the "admin(s)"
of the team can create and assign permissions from the authoring
client and otherwise manage the Server site remotely without having
to pester the Web Administrator for maintenance of the site.
The staging server scenario you mention is an option that is
completely up to your team and the IT folks. RoboHelp Server
doesn't care one way or another. It's just an application sitting
on a IIS web server. That server could be the "development or
staging" server or the so-called "production" or live server.
The different languages you mention could be published to the
same server and comingled into a single site (kind of messy) or you
could have different language sites (as long as they are different
domains/IP addresses) sitting on the same RoboHelp Server enabled
machine.
Regarding language, one important item to research is the
RoboHelp version you are using and it's language support. The
much-anticipated Adobe RoboHelp 7 (now in beta and expected "before
the end of the year") will have full Unicode/double byte character
support for 35 languages and a wonderful way of handling
translation workflows.
Well, that should get you started. Let me know what I've
missed!
Thanx,
john
John Daigle
Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor
Newport, Oregon