Sweet Taste of Victory:
RoboHelp 2003 Awards for Excellence

by Robin Dube

Good news is always better shared, which is why I'm happy to report the Documentation Group at Agfa Healthcare (formerly Mitra) won the Grand Prize (USA/Canada) for the RoboHelp 2003 Awards for Excellence.

Why did we enter?

When I heard about the RoboHelp 2003 Awards for Excellence, I thought this would be a great way for our Documentation Group at Agfa Healthcare to get some external feedback on the online knowledge bases we have been creating for the past three years. My manager, Kristi Fox, and I put together a pared down knowledge base (what we call our "online help") and sent the RoboHTML-generated WebHelp system off to the contest.

Much to our surprise, we received an email from eHelp Corporation a couple months later:

First of all, I would like to thank you for participating in this year's RoboHelp Awards for Excellence event. Secondly, I think you should know that your Help system was chosen as our Grand Prize Winner (US/Canada) & I am proud to announce that you are recipient of $1,000 on behalf of RoboHelp. Congratulations on putting together a superb Help system, recognized by those who create Help systems.

"This recognition, for our entire team, was really gratifying," said Kristi Fox, Documentation Group Manager. "It validates the efforts we've made to produce quality products."

How do we get from A to B?

When asked to share our good news, the Quill editor requested that we talk a little about how we create our online knowledge bases.

Our team has spent about three years creating and streamlining our online documentation products. One of the main tenets of our process is to separate the content creation from the production of the final WebHelp system.

Home page from our entry

All of the content is authored in Macromedia Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver provides us with advanced content creation features, such as templates, and library items (reusable snippets of HTML code), as well as very clean and readable code. (Oddly enough, Macromedia just announced the purchase of eHelp Corporation, the makers of RoboHelp. Perhaps RoboHTML will start using the Dreamweaver interface natively.)

After authoring the content, our writers use FAR HTML (http://www.helpware.net/) to create an HTML Help Project file (.hhp). We then open this HHP file in RoboHTML. Why? FAR allows us to add hundreds of HTML files at once to an HHP file, while RoboHTML requires that you add each file and folder individually to a project. The time savings using FAR are enormous.

After we've opened the project in RoboHTML, we create the TOC, index the knowledge base, and then generate the WebHelp based on a custom WebHelp skin. During this process, we also use a quality checklist to ensure that the final product uses the most up-to-date templates, contains no typos, and so on.

What about the money?

Usually, winning a technical writing competition means a warm fuzzy feeling and a nice certificate, but we are receiving a cheque for $1000 US. So, instead of splitting this eight ways for our personal Christmas fund, we've decided to donate the prize to a local charity.