Two-step Conversion Requirement

[Circadian]

Hi All - new here, first post. Seasoned technical writer, 12 years experience, some prior experience with Robohelp and AuthorIT, none with Flare products to date.

I am in a new job, it's an SAAS company in property management.

When they started the product I'm working on, about 8 years ago, they hired a tech writer who did a great job building their help file using a product called Help Console - the current implementation is in Help Console 2010. I have never seen that product before but it looks OK.

However the company has decided to get rid of Help Console, on the basis they don't like the 'user manual' approach to help text. They want to replace it with Knowledge Base articles on their Helpdesk App, which is called Freshdesk. They're also planning to use a web help widget from a start-up, which provides a pop-up help system on any page (either calls knowledge base articles, or a small pop-up contextual help).

I gave a presentation on what Help Authoring systems do and how they're different from Knowledge Base systems and urged them to keep their help system. However they've made the decision to dump it, (although they have offered to hire a contractor to do the migration.) But overall, I don't think it's a good decision.

Anyway, what I'm thinking of doing is converting the whole help system back into MS Word. Help Console does publish the content as either .PDF or Static Help, and it is very well-organised, the person who wrote it was very meticulous and methodical, it looks and reads like a really well-put-together user guide. It's around 320 pages in PDF format, so it's not unmanegeable.

I will then work on converting it into MS Word styles that can be easily copied into their knowledge base app which is an extremely basic WYSIWYG web tool. I think I will have to take a very minimalist approach in doing that - reduce all the styles three headings styles, simple tables, and lists.

So, first I have to convert all this content out of Help Format into Word format. Then, I want to investigate using Doc to Help in case they want to go back to a proper web help system in the future.

So I just thought I would float this idea here as there's a lot of experienced tech writers in this forum.

[SKamprowski]

Hi,

Since Flare works with an internal html editor, I suggest to start with html files, created by Help Console.
I assume that this is the easier way.
I experienced some troubles when I did my first steps with Flare (about 2 years ago) starting with Word documents.

Kind regards,
Sabine Kamprowski