RE: Need help with Help

["Technical Writing Plus" <doc-x -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Aviva, Wikipedia might be able to help you get a handle on the issue. Their
articles on 

H & M: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_%26_Manual

HATs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_help_authoring_tools

Online Help:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_help

Technical Communication:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_communication .

I hope this will help you. It seems to me that in the very short term, you
would want to figure out how to get into that H&M help system to change
things to represent the new ownership, and possibly you would want to change
any things that might represent large changes in policy that have come about
because of the change in ownership. I imagine that you would want to get
detaile guidelines for all of this from the company management.

Some of the more detailed and smaller things could wait a bit, I suppose.

I have heard that Help & Manual is a good, low-cost system that is
easy-to-learn. 

Some other person mentioned the HATT Yahoogroup. That is a good resource. 

Jim Jones	  

cartoons-jim.blogspot.com 
stc-chicago-jim.blogspot.com
akn6z.wordpress.com

Technical Workshop Coordinator for STC Chicago


-----Original Message-----
... Help & Manual to author a help 
> system for a reporting program that is replacing Crystal 
> reports. Apparently, the company we bought this program from 
> used H&M to create it's help files so we need to modify them 
> to reflect our company and our software. I hope this makes sense.
> 
> I have no idea where to begin compiling information to put in 
> these help files. I've only been on the job here for a little 
> over three months so most things are still new to me, 
> including our proprietary program and this new reporting 
> system. Can anyone advise me how to go about compiling help 
> data? Who I should be talking to? How to structure the 
> information? I'm also the only writer here!

You seem to be saying that your company bought a system and customized
it, or had the supplier customize on their behalf... 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing 
solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor,  Microsoft Word or 
HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals. 
http://www.doctohelp.com

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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