Third-party knowledge base integration

[sfoley]

Has anyone here ever attempted integration of Flare content into a third-party knowledge base system? If so, what has your experience been like? What tools, if any, did you use?

Our support team would like us to merge our user guide and FAQ content with their existing system. We'd like to keep the KB files updated automatically with as little effort on our part as possible. The KB system accepts XML and CSV input in predefined formats; we think that the only way to do this right would be to write up a script to scan our raw Flare content files, parse them with Xalan and a custom XSLT stylesheet, and kick off an automated content import.

Being writers with a healthy workload, we don't have a lot of time to implement anything truly fancy; we'd also like to keep this to open-source software if possible. Still, any suggestions are welcomed, since we've never done anything like this before.

[RamonS]

I used Flare itself successfully as tool for creating knowledge bases. So you may want to see if incorporating existing content into a Flare project is an option.

[LTinker68]

The KB system accepts XML and CSV input in predefined formats...

Do you mean format as in style/appearance or as in preset fields with specific names and max. characters?

[sfoley]

@LTinker68: The latter -- it expects text that matches their XML schema, or a CSV that matches their Excel template.

@RamonS: Unfortunately, we weren't part of the decision-making process for choosing the KB vendor. We're simply trying to do our best from an outside perspective.