Hosting Flare WebHelp on Amazon S3

[raikeswood]

I was wondering if anyone had any experience of hosting their WebHelp on Amazon S3? I'm just beginning to look into hosting Help on Cloud Servers. Any advice, recommendations or alternatives would be a great help. Thanks.

Gareth Williams
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/garethjwilliams

[dlogan]

Hi
We have our software product (and the in-product help, which is generated in Flare 5.0 to produce Web Help output) running in the Amazon EC2 cloud. I haven't done anything different to the output for this environment. Don't know if that helps, but it would be great to hear how you get on!
Rgds
dlogan

[canoerqueen]

Hi you guys,

I am just getting started posting Flare help to S3. I am wondering if you have best practices and help you can give me. Any gotchas?

I am looking for an index.htm but only see an index.js and am curious to know if that will work. The properties saved nicely when I used it.
Will I be able to place my files for CSH in an S3 bucket?

How do users in the cloud deal with versioning issues with the product if help is publicly available? I have one product that will always have the latest help, no versioning necessary and I have other products that the help must always be version specific. Just wondering how that plays out in the google universe.

Thanks for your help! Linda

[awojcicki]

Looks like I'm also doing the same thing! What did you set your Destination Type as for the Amazon S3 bucket? FTP, SFTP, or File System?

[djohnson]

I am loading all my help systems on Amazon S3; it works pretty well but has some drawbacks (no PHP, so custom forms are out of the question)

The page to load for your help system is whatever is set as the Output File in the General tab of your skin. I have always manually set this to index.htm; I am pretty sure the default is something different (possibly related to the project name).

For versioning, I upload a new help system for each software version. We use two different methods for two different products.

For product A, we don't intend there to be new features for a revision (from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1, for example), so I only need to upload new help systems for minor and major updates.
I upload my output to a folder named something like /en/product_a/1.0/, and I load the page /en/product_a/1.0/index.htm (this string is actually generated in the software depending on the language of the installed app and its version number but can be hard-coded as well)
This help system will cover versions 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, and so on. I only need to upload a new version when version 1.1 of the softwar comes out (and it goes into a /1.1/ folder)

For product B, the product manager wants a new help system for every revision, so I have to create folders 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ad infinitum. Fortunately the content doesn't change often (no new features added!) so I don't have to update & rebuild my help for each of these releases.

As I mentioned, we link directly to the help from within the product; I'm not sure how you can make Google find specific versions. You could always have a master page that lists and links to all of your existing versions and hope that Google finds it (I'm not an SEO guy so that's already more than I know about Google searches!)

For uploading, I publish my project locally then use CloudBerry Explorer to upload to the S3 bucket. You need to set the ACL for the project folder and subfolders and files so that all users have Read-Only capability (otherwise nobody can see your help). You should also perform a "CloudFront Invalidation" on the folder after you set the ACLs, so that the Amazon caches are purged of old content.

= = = =

Things I don't like about the Amazon system (and there may be easy solutions to these but I haven't had time to suss them out):
You really need to use something like CloudBerry Explorer to upload & configure your help, but there isn't anything I've found with a very intuitive interface, or anything that can be automated.
You can't rely on Amazon to know that just calling for "http://myhelpocs.example.com/en/product_a/1.0/" should load one of the default files (index.htm, index.html, default.htm,etc.); you must specify the index page as well (the page specified in the Output File field of the General tab of your skin)

Good luck!