Re: Oxygen WebHelp and Adobe Experience Manager

[Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Oxygen and XMetal generate different webhelp output. No relation.

I've used Oxygen webhelp, which is good. It's responsive so it works on 
small devices. Remember that each webhelp system you generate has its 
own self-contained search system. If your company uses a private search 
tool like Elasticsearch, and it is indexing your webhelp files, you 
might get funny results from it. Something to check for.

If your company already has AEM (which is a big expensive web CMS, not 
the DITA CCMS add-on), then maybe the AEM DITA CCMS add-on could be 
interesting to you. But you don't want to buy AEM just to use the DITA 
CCMS, unless you have money to burn.

I've used AEM by itself and I've noticed that marketing people seem to 
really like it. I think it's because it has nice tools they can use to 
get web analytics on their marketing campaigns and such. To customize it 
you often need Java programmers. It is not a great tool to use for 
displaying big doc sets, because AEM is set up to make you create each 
page using AEM, not in some outside authoring tool. Dumping big sets of 
doc files on it (like a webhelp system) causes it to get confused over 
time. Maybe the DITA CCMS add-on handles this in some way.

I also used the DITA CCMS add-on to AEM about 1.5 years ago just after 
it came out of beta. A client had been a beta site for it. They were 
already using DITA and were not using many features of the CCMS yet. But 
it seemed to be reasonably good feature-wise compared to other DITA 
CCMSes. It used the DITA Open Toolkit for publishing, but you could also 
use Adobe's Framemaker publishing server (about 10k last I heard), which 
lets you do styling in the Framemaker editor and publish it, bypassing 
the DITA OT.

But I doubt you need it, explained above. There are smaller, much more 
affordable DITA CCMSes like easyDITA that you might look at. Or you can 
just keep your DITA source files in something like Git. Or if you want a 
full blown standalone DITA CCMS you could look at Ixiasoft or SDL.

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.

On 9/13/2018 1:44 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote: