Integrating MS Word documents when Publishing (NOT Importing)

[md]

I'm evaluating Arbortext, not currently using it. My company has started using Arbortext in other departments, but not in quite the way I am considering using it and my coworkers are not able to answer this question. Thanks in advance for sharing your experience/knowledge!!

I would like to use Arbortext Editor to author XML-based documentation that will be published to PDF using profiles and tags to produce documentation based an particular product configurations (the documentation varies depending on the modules and configuration of the product). This much seems to be the main application for Arbortext. We have current documentation in MS Word and I know this content can be imported and then maintained in Arbortext.

My challenge is integrating MS Word documents into the published output. The MS Word documents need to remain in MS Word because they are part of the product itself. These documents get updated from version to version.

Hopefully I am explaining this clearly. I think what I need to do is to specifiy "links" to external content, and that content should be integrated into the published output. By using "links" (I'm not sure this is the correct term in Arbortext, but it is the idea I'm trying to convey), instead of importing, the published content will update when the target of the links gets updated. If I import the documents, then I would need to re-import the documents each time they are changed.

In addition, the links must be "profilable". That is, there may be several links to external MS Word documents, but depending on the product configuration only some of the links should be integrated into the published output.

Does anyone have experience doing something like this?

Thanks again!

Matt

[PaulNagai-disab]

You should take a look at Arbortext Digital Media Publisher (DMP). This is the product Arbortext now delivers their help content in. In addition to being able to publish HTML that is compiled into an intelligent wrapper allowing for powerful searching on full text as well as metadata, DMP can incorporate many other "standard" document types including PDF, Word, other Office files, etc. Fabulously further, most of these BLOBs (am I showing my age) are indexed by DMP and can be searched alongside the entire contents of the library being published or as a class (PDF only, HTML only, etc.).

I know it is not what you are trying to do, but we publish PDF, DMP (by way of HTML), and Word files (by way of Export to RTF) all from the same XML source within the same DMP library. The HTML and PDFs are searchable and automatically placed into the DMP Table of Contents or left-side navigation pane. The Word files are hidden and are only intended to be used by field leads to conduct review and SME input using Word's revision technology.

This presentation video might be helpful in getting a feel for what DMP can do:

http://www.sfbayptcuser.org/blog/tag/dmp/