I did start listening to the podcast at home, then read the whole interview on justwriteclick.com instead because I can’t connect to the podcast from work… (yeah I know…)

I further analyzed our needs and I think that for our norms and process documentation, we don’t need to use single-sourcing because we won’t reuse content that much, if at all.

For user guides, however, it’s the best solution IMHO because we will reuse content. Plus, if we want to publish (in whatever format) a whole guide containing the User and Developer parts, we can; with a wiki, we’ll have to maintain two sources, and that can become a nightmare.

I did talk to Anne through e-mail and she told me about her wiki slicing article, going to read it now!

Thx for the advice, I’ll keep you posted! Your sites (Anne’s and yours) are my discoveries of the week

And I’ll check out Flare. I did do lots of work as a technical author with XML + DocBook, managing and publishing multilingual manuals using single sourcing, but I haven’t used more commercial tools like Frame and RoboHelp for that purpose.

Re single sourcing and wiki use, did you listen to my latest podcast on this topic? Anne talks about the possibility of outputting to wiki.

My personal advice echoes Anne’s: use the wiki as a supplement to your documentation rather than the core of it. Your users may not contribute as much as you think (unless your entire project team is writing the documentation). Remember that you have a job as a technical author and others may just dump all documentation tasks on you, rather than writing them on the wiki. Others usually do not like to do documentation for fun. So even if you started up a wiki, you might be making 99 percent of the contributions. Use a single sourcing tool — Flare, RoboHelp, ePublisher, or some DITA tool — to create your content. Flare even allows users to make comments beneath each topic now. Then have your wiki as a supplement to the online help.

Sorry, but that’s the best solution I can think of right now. If you find a way to single source your wiki into a PDF output that is coherent and useful, let me know.

I’m involved in the deployment of a documentation solution for our company. We have two visions right now. The one I’m pushing a single-source based solution because we have defined many audiences and we want to be able to reuse content.

Another vision is to use a wiki that would document every small component and them link them together.

If I could find a single-source based wiki, I’d be very happy. It seems Traction® TeamPage5 is not a single-source type system and I’m afraid that if we use such a system we’ll be doing some cut’n'paste for nothing…

Any other solution would be appreciated!

Also, thanks for the dimdim.com site. That does look to be exactly what I’m searching for. Their site says they aren’t ready to launch the product, but I signed up to be notified when that happens.

Keep up your great blog.

regarding your first question: Mindquarry (http://www.mindquarry.com) is an Open Source Enterprise Wiki for Collaboration that was designed from ground up to be extensible and multi-format. Everything in Mindquarry is stored as XML document and these documents are available via an REST interface (so it is very easy to write custom applications that retrieve data from the wiki or publish data to the wiki)

Additionally every Wiki page can be represented in three formats: XML, HTML (the default) and PDF. Our development framework makes it possible to support additional formats like Word or RTF as well.

Disclaimer: I am founder and COO of Mindquarry and we offer enterprise support and customization for Mindquarry, so I might be biased.

Regarding your second question: Did you take a look at Dimdim (http://www.dimdim.com/) it positions itself as an Open Source Alternative to WebEx, so it might be what you are looking for. (I am not affiliated with Dimdim)