Monday, December 15, 2008

Can You Use a Help Authoring Tool As A Content Management System?

An upcoming vendor-neutral webinar presented through MadCap Software...

If your documentation group is considering adopting a CMS, you may find that training, workflow, and cultural hurdles can make implementation harder than you think. And even a simple commercial CMS is far more expensive than traditional authoring tools, so those hurdles can get expensive.

Help authoring tools (HATs) like Flare and RoboHelp seem unrelated to CMSs, but HATs have gone far beyond their help authoring roots. They offer, or are starting to offer, features like repositories, version control, review management, content customization using conditionality and variables, and more. HATs today are effectively lightweight CMSs.

This means that if you're planning to move to a CMS, you may be able to use your current HAT to create a simulated CMS to find operational problems before buying the "real" CMS. You may even find that you can use your HAT as your CMS, saving a lot of money and upheaval. That's the subject of this webinar.

This webinar will take place on Thursday, March 12, from 9 AM to 10 AM PT. For information or to register, go to www1.gotomeeting.com/register/187845873. For information about other MadCap webinars, go to www.madcapsoftware.com/training/webinars.aspx