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Technical documents, Intranet Solution

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by bcolman

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I have been challenged to help distribute the technical knowledge and methods we employ to others in a manufacturing facility.

I will be developing a complete operations manual for that facility.

I would like to follow the model that techrepublic has set up for their web site, different interest groups (departments), notes will be read in HTML, button selection for the printer friendly format, and a PDF download as an option.

Problem is I have no clue what software I should be utilizing to generate the technical documentation. The will be a fair amount of pictorial examples included. These pictures will be both photographs and computer generated renderings.

There may be a requirement for short video clips as part of an internal training requirement.

No small undertaking, and I do want to start on the right foot.

Ideas and suggestions are appreciated.

11 replies

by 20 + years still

As you are mentioning a PDF download you already may be sitting on your answer. Everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat Reader but not the fact that there is a licensed product with tremendous publishing utilities. I think this would be the solution for you for many if not all aspects that you have mentioned in your question.
www.adobe.com.

Good Luck sounds like a fun project.

by vinnyd

If you are using Office XP, you will find the SharePoint server that comes free with it.

With a Microsoft IIS 5.0 server running you can create an Intranet that the users of Office can post the articles direct to the intranet site to share them with others.

You can use the normal formats for Word and Excel instead of converting them to any thing else and you can make the documents read-only so people can only reveiw them. Or, you can provide the rights to certain uses to be able to modifythe documents.

by ajays

You do have a problem. It is in two parts.
1. Content should be designed to be separable from the presentation. The content objects should be discrete and searchable. use metatagging for this and preferably store as XML sets. This would help you get to SCORM compliance at a later date.
2. It appears that you need to integrate media objects with texts. I presume that you would be able to design standardised templates for the same.
3. use Flash MX for development of media objects and integrateit in an HTML/ XML delivery engine. This is a preferred approach as flash allows you to operate in different user environments.
4. Flash MX would also help you in externalising media objects and therefore changing the same would be easy.
5. Create templates and just pour content into it.Follow this step with integration of text based content in an HTML/ XML creation engine. Very simple to make.
4. The other suggested option would be java applets. However it is difficult solution and skills are hard to find

by luis faustino

Hello,

You have two aproaches to this solution:

1st -There are several applications on this on the market if query a search engine on content management you'll find information on this, one of the best solutions out there is vignette, I assure you that every portal on the internet that has a My... version that can be customized for every user gathering information from lots of sources is using some sort of content management application.
The other solution is developing your own application, if you are familiar with some sort of dialect such as ASP, PHP, coldfusion or something like this you'll succeed.

by jose mir

I suggest taking a look at Adobe FrameMaker. It supports PDF creation (with Acrobat) and scalable vector graphics.
We use it at IEEE for document submitting in PDF format and it work very good (it has many features beyond my user capabilities).

Jose P Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

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