Nearly a Week Hold, but ... you know

"You must be busy" an editor once wrote to me as a lead-in to why he wasn't going to publish the column I had just submitted to him. And it's true - my mind has not been focused on writing blog posts here. Life in 2014, especially with Alex's Babe Ruth baseball season about to ramp up with his first practice tonight, is only going to become more busy as April unfolds in front of me. Sometimes, things slip through the cracks, like this exchange on the HATT list that is almost a week old. I just came across it in my Sent Items while looking for something else and so, before I moved on to other things, I wanted to get this preserved as a blog post for my own future reference.
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On 4/2/2014, Ari wrote:
 
Does anyone have a chart that compares SmartDocs, Doc2Help and Flare for SINGLE SOURCING (not for Helps)? I have yet to see a third-party, objective chart that includes all three.

As a sole TC at my company, I am evaluating options for single-sourcing our Word-based user software documentation (with PDF output, no Helps at this time), and whether to leave the content as Word-based). I will be trying out the trial versions of these products in the coming weeks. (I do have FrameMaker and RoboHelp experience but do not plan to use these.) 

I responded with this:
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Ari,

I don’t have a chart to send you. I used the trial version of D2H a couple of years ago and sat in a demo of SmartDocs at the 2012 WritersUA conference in Memphis, TN. Most of our legacy docs are in Word so I was looking for the same type of solution. I have received a lot of emails from Flare touting their single sourcing abilities, but did not install the trial.

I did spend some time with Doc-to-Help and was able to tag content for a specific user guide output – so it worked fine. There were test projects on their website and that helped me out a lot in addition to how their staff went above and beyond what I would have expected them to do for me using the software on a trial. I would recommend Doc-to-Help.

That’s not to say the SmartDocs people were not very good and accommodating as well. I know they are getting ready to release a new version that touts many new features so I wouldn’t rule them out. The thing I remember about SmartDocs is that they didn’t have a built-in way to generate browser-based online Help so if you think that is going to be a future requirement, you may need to consider that – I have no idea if they ended up implementing that ability or not.

Our situation is that we had a user guide for System A and we had Client 1. Then we got Client 2 and because there was no single source solution, the previous TWer took the user guide for System A and Client 1, saved a copy of it, and modified it. Like all writers seem to do, when the writer read something that didn’t flow right, it was changed for Client 2. Over time, more and more clients were added and the same workflow of making a copy (as a base) of the Word doc was followed. Eventually, we have ended up with different versions of the same procedure to accomplish a task.

For example, in Client 1’s user guide, you may see this:

Adding a Widget
1.    Go to Path 1 > Path 2.
2.    Click Add.
3.    Enter the details.
Note:  The User ID and password fields are required.
4.    Click Save.

And in Client 2’s user guide, you may see this:

Adding a Widget
1.    Go to Path 1 > Path 2.
2.    Click Add, and then enter the details. The User ID and password fields are required.
3.    Click Save.

This is a simple example and some of the differences are more detailed than my example, but you get the idea. My point is that if your existing content has anything like this, where the same section / content is in more than one document, you will have to figure out the “real” version of that content outside of the tool. I was working on creating a single version of “Adding a Widget” so that content could be placed within all the outputs that need it. The mess I was trying to sort out was very intimidating so if you are going to face that, good luck! <grin>

All that said, we are not going to be using a single source solution with Word. We are moving our documentation to Confluence, which has pros and cons like most tools, and implementing single sourcing that way.