MadCap Software Forums

Hey everyone,

I am looking for some suggestions. We have a Documentation Repository available to everyone in the company. It is currently stored on Confluence and is a single page with links to Release Notes, and any form of Guides that we put together. The guides are currently small and created in Word.

The problem I am looking for a solution to is that several documents in the repository have similar if not the same images in them. I was thinking that if I can create the documents in Flare and link to the same image, I will only have to update the image once. The problem with separate images besides having to keep the screenshots up to date, I don't know which images are in which documents. I would literally have to scan through all documents to see if a similar image is used.

Is there some way Flare can help me in this mess? I was thinking about maybe adding tags to documents so I know which part of the software is included in a particular document. Then I could just look for all documents with a specific tag. This sounds like a lot of work and mess also.

Would love to hear any ideas you may have to organize a documentation repository.

Thanks.
Pam

Does anyone maintain a repository? How have you implemented it?

Flare's strengths are not as a document repository - it is more for authoring and content management. Therefore I don't think Flare will help much here - this sounds like more of a content strategy/process issue. You could import the word docs into one or more Flare projects, and use Flare's various single sourcing features to share common content and images. But from there it's about managing that content - for example, separate out concepts (less likely to change) with task-based info and UI reference (most likely to change). Then it would be helpful to get the whole company to help review info regularly and point out changes and improvements required (perhaps using Pulse/social collaboration or wiki comments)?