Sharing One RoboHelp Project Among Multiple Authors

The Way It Was: Fighting Over Files

Ever since I began using RoboHelp in 1992, I've seen writing teams fight over project file sharing. The problem was painfully clear. If you were on a multiauthor team and needed to edit just one topic, you were out of luck if a colleague had already opened the project. (Picture the squawking pelicans in Finding Nemo—"Mine! Mine! Mine!")

Being locked out of a project was bad enough. A backup strategy was even more dicey. It was not practical to place a project on a LAN share for a scheduled backup. This led to all sorts of home-brew backup schemes by writers notoriously paranoid about lost work. ("Hm, at what stage was the project when I made that CD/Zip/floppy archive?") Mercifully, all that has changed.

The Way It Is Now: Sharing Files

Now authors can share the same project with file check-out and check-in (see Figure 1). The red checkmarks show that the author has checked out these topics. They may be viewed, but not edited, by others on the team. The red-boxed icon in the File Status pane tells this author that the topic administration_policies.htm cannot be edited because it is already checked out by someone else.

Figure 1. The red checkmarks on the left in the Project pane as well as the new File Status tab are examples of RoboSource Control at work.

Increasingly, RoboHelp users are now part of teams made up of many disciplines besides technical writing. The intranet website boom has made everybody a web author. This is especially true for online policies and procedures manuals, which various departments within an organization typically own. Multiple authors, along with subject-matter experts, are asked to contribute and maintain their part of the company intranet. Conflict comes when more than one author needs to edit the same project file.

As I teach RoboHelp throughout North America, I notice that students have a misconception that source (or version) control must be difficult. This is because writers are not always given the opportunity to use systems such as Visual SourceSafe. Source control is often restricted to software developers and carries a certain techie mystique. Fortunately, those students with misgivings are happy to see how easy it is to use once it's demonstrated. Yes, there's new lingo to learn and a new way of working, but the payoff is huge. The key to success is to develop a team strategy for using it, which I explain later on.

Basic Features of RoboSource Control

RoboHelp Office X5 with RoboSource Control solves content management problems for both lone authors and multiple authoring teams by providing a two-part solution, including the following:

• Client application integrated right into the toolbar of the RoboHelp authoring application
• Database-driven server application that the author can access

The following content management and version control features are provided:

• An author can check in and check out projects or parts of projects. Although other authors on the team can still see the checked-out project or files, they cannot edit them because they are "read-only" until the owner checks them back in.
• Authors can identify the member of the team who controls the checked-out file.
• The project is maintained in a database on a LAN share drive (if desired), which offers the protection of backing up projects that are typically done periodically on such drives.
• More than one author can work on at least a part of a project while another author works on a different part.
• Ease of use is ensured because the project is run on the author's local (faster) hard drive.
• There is now a way to roll back a file if it becomes corrupt or if you want a topic to revert to a previous version.
• Each member of the team can identify who authored what and when because each version is time- and date-stamped.
• If there is ever any confusion about what has changed, you can compare version differences side by side to validate which is which and what additions, deletions, or modifications were made.
• In addition to the out-of-the-box RoboSource Control server, RoboHelp X5 accommodates third-party source-control programs such as Visual SourceSafe or any program that is compliant with the Microsoft SCC API.

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