System Snapshots for Multiple Client Customizations

[nstorey]

I'm sure what I am dealing with is not unique to our project, and I still consider myself "new" to the single-sourcing methodology for producing documentation.

Background:
We have a Base (or Legacy?) product that will be customized to an extent for each client to whom it is sold. We will be producing Webhelp for end-users and system administrators at multiple user levels (entry level to management level), including PDF documentation and Context-Sensitive Help...

Because we want each of our clients to have a "customized" experience, we will be making changes to our screens reflecting their system name and possibly doing other customizations as well...

Initially, I was thrilled about the Variables in Flare so I could change terminology based on my client/target... I was looking at this with too narrow a view... now I know we have images to deal with as well... and many, many, many of them.

My question to you:
What is the best way to manage images w/in content when it is possible that every image will be customized is some way, shape, form or fasion for our multiple clients?

Would it make any sense at all to try to figure out a way to swap out screen shots depending on the client/target or would it make more sense to just create a new project for each new client??

[LTinker68]

What you want to do is look into snippets with conditions. You can put all the versions of one particular screenshot into a snippet and conditionalize them, then insert the snippet into the topic where the screen will go. The conditional tags you've specified for each target will control which screenshots/info appears in the output. So you'd need to create a conditional tag for each customer.

[nstorey]

Awesome! I had that thought but I didn't want to go to the effort if I was thinking off-base, or I was just going to create a mess... I have my project in Subversion so I didn't want to take this on without bouncing it off of the community! Thank you for your quick feedback. This is what I will proceed with.

Thank you!
Nancy