LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Adam Smith <adam.smith@sageautomation.com>
  To  : <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 16:21:28 +1030

Knowledgebasey thing

Disaster!!

Ugh.  My boss has gone directly to one of our Technical Writing staff to
try and organize the creation of a "knowledgebase."

This is disastrous, because I've had phone calls and I've had questions
from him regarding the following two technologies which are making me
dry reech as I type this email:

 - IIS 5.0
 - Compiled HTML or Compiled Help or whatever it is.

They basically want a knowledgebase that can be browsed/searched online
via our Intranet (which would now have to incorporate IIS.. rip my heart
out) and then they want a version of it which can be portable -- so that
our site guys can take it away with them and use it whenever they are on
site.  They modeled it on the Citect Knowledgebase (www.citect.com)
which is exactly what they want to replicate.

His answer is to use a product called Doc2Help (blech!) which generates
Windows Help files and HTML navigational things out of Word Documents.
So basically the answer according to him is to create WORD documents,
generate them into some CHF navigationable/searchable engine and compile
it into a distributable format.  All of which it's able to do, but
really grossly and disturbingly.

My obvious answer would be to create a php front-end to a MySQL database
and just store all the articles in there, be able to search it, edit it,
whatever using our Intranet.  The problem is, what about the portable
version they want?

What can I suggest that will make this hideous nightmare go away? lol



--
Adam Smith
Information Technology Officer
SAGE Automation Ltd.

adam.smith@sageautomation.com
http://www.sageautomation.com

Phone:   (08) 8276 0703
Fax:     (08) 8276 0799
Mobile:  0414 895 273


-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ IRC: #linuxsa on irc.openprojects.net
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject