How to determine what to put in a project?

[MaryF]

We're very new to Flare and are a little perplexed about how to determine out what to put in a project!

Any thoughts or guidelines about what to consider for a project or factors to weigh?

For example, would a project represent one of the software products that our company creates? Would we split up the documentation for a product into multiple projects by features of the product? Or, would a project represent one of the types of user documentation (ex: implementation guide) for the product? Does the number of writers that need to work on documentation for the same product play into our consideration?

Many thanks!

[LTinker68]

I think you should start first with determining your workflow and somewhat look at the content. For instance, if you have three editions of your software product (e.g., "home" or basic, standard, enterprise), then you'd most likely want all of them in the same project because they probably share a lot of the same content. In that situation, you'd use conditional tags to differentiate content that goes in one or two editions but not the other (e.g., a feature is in enterprise but not basic or standard).

If you have multiple products that only have a few pieces of content in common (appearance of the skin, warranty info, support contact info, etc.), then you might want to put those common pieces in a "global" project and create one project per product and each project links to the common content in the "global" project.

You definitely don't want to split up the project by different types of user documentation. Flare provide single sourcing capabilities, so you have one project with all your content and from that same project you can generate WebHelp (online help), one or more print outputs (e.g., User's Guide, Getting Started Guide, Administrator's Guide), and so on.

[MaryF]

Thanks Lisa - appreciate the insight - we are just beginning to explore global project linking and external references. We also have legacy products for which we will migrate documentation so the idea of putting common pieces in a 'global project' is definitely appealing - thanks again!

[rob hollinger]

MadCap offers all kinds of training that can help with this also.

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/services/ ... ining.aspx

For this specific question - I would look at the Project Management and Team Authoring class.