Announcing HelpServer’s newest features.

Workflow Management: With HelpServer's workflow mechanism administrators define the flow of tasks to be performed on folders and topics. People who need to perform a task indicate whether the task is completed, rejected, or skipped which then triggers task transitions. On each task transition notification messages are send to the assigned contributors of a project to make sure they know when to start their part of the work. Assigned contributors can generate task lists, which tell them exactly what tasks to perform. As soon as the entire workflow is completed, the project is locked against unauthorized changes.

Annotations: HelpServer allows reviewers and approvers of a project to add annotations (=remarks/comments) to topics and folders. These remarks allow authorized editors to correct and to improve the provided content. If annotations are combined with notifications, the authorized authors will be automatically warned when annotations are added.

DITA support: HelpServer allows you to import content from files that have the .dita or the .ditamap extension. You can also generate output that produces DITA files. Note however, that HelpServer does not yet validate against the DITA scheme. However, you can use a third party tool such as XMetal to create your structured DITA files. If you import content from DITA files you can further develop it and generate various types of web-based and print-based output. You can of course send the HelpServer content back out to DITA to import it in another tool.

Snippets: Snippets are pre-set chunks of formatted content that can be reused in topics of a HelpServer project. This prevents redundancies and errors. Snippets can be used in a multitude of ways throughout your help & documentation projects:

• Snippets can be suggested while Authors are typing.
• Authors are able to search the content for phrazes and replace a phraze by a snippet.
• Authors can simply select a snippet object from the project gallery to insert it in the content.

Snippets are in fact topics that are create and maintained in a HelpServer project gallery. Besides text a snippet topic can include any object that can be inserted in a regular topic such as text, images, hyperlinks, variables, etc.