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I am a tech writer working on a fairly large-scale technology start up and
we are in the initial stages of analysing how we might best utilize
available tools to maximize writing resources. The product is a computing
device that will be customized to client specification, so while each
client's installation of the product will be unique, many of the
fundamental workings of the mechanism will be common to any installation. It seems
clear to me that we should be trying to figure out how to modularize and re-use
our documentation. For lack of a better term, I think of this as object
oriented documentation.
A few years ago I worked for a client who had invested a lot of time and
money in Interleaf and a "relational document management" system called
RDM (sold and maintained by Interleaf and running on Unix). My recollection is
that RDM was Oracle-based, and allowed you to query the system for doc
modules of say, x.x release level, or the "customer y" product stream,
etc. While it wasn't the most elegant system, it provided a fairly
automated process for building books from the "common" and existing
documentation, thus allowing writers to concentrate on the development of
new product information.
In my current incarnation on this new product start up, we are already
pretty invested in Framemaker 5.5 (on Windows NT). Does anyone know of any
similar tool sets available for controlling and automating the
documentation development process for Frame? Also I would appreciate
hearing of any reader experiences related to modularizing and re-using
documentation.
Thanks.
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