Leveraging cloud services for collaboration in RoboHelp 11

Hello Everyone,

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As many of you would know, we released RoboHelp 11 on Jan 14, 2014. In this blog, I will be covering an exciting new feature which allows you to seamlessly connect RoboHelp Resource Manager with the sync folders of popular cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, or any other cloud storage service.

Over the last few years, cloud storage services have grown in popularity and a number of professionals are using these services to share assets with each other. Our own survey of technical communication industry reveal that overall, the extent of collaboration is increasing and now the technical writers are collaborating across geographies with both internal as well as external teams.

How to hook up a cloud service with a RoboHelp project

Over the past couple of releases, Resource Manager feature in RoboHelp has become very popular, as many users use this feature to share common assets such as snippets, images, CSS, and master pages etc. In RoboHelp 11, we have modified the workflow slightly so that you can quickly add the sync folders of various cloud services within Resource Manager. This allows authors to collaborate seamlessly with anyone anywhere in the world. While the respective cloud storage service takes care of syncing the assets in the cloud, RoboHelp 11 keeps the assets in the project in sync with those in the sync folder of the cloud service.

You can add the cloud sync folder in the Resource Manager, click on the add folder icon in the Resource Manager pod.

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A new pop-up will open up in which you can select the location type in the drop-down menu.

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If you select Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, RoboHelp 11 will automatically detect the installed folders of these cloud services. You don’t need to browse these folders explicitly. However, by default the entire sync folder will be added in the resource manager.

If you want to select a specific sub-folder within your cloud sync folder, you can click on the folder icon adjacent to the folder path and choose a specific subfolder of your choice. You can also give a specific name to the chosen folder so that you remember what this folder is for. For example, if you use Dropbox folder to receive images from a peer, you might want to name the folder as “Images from John”. Please note that the name you provide the folder is only for display in the Resource Manager. It DOES NOT rename the actual folder. In addition to specifying a name, you can also instruct RoboHelp to display a cloud icon for the added folder. This helps in visually distinguishing which folders are cloud folders and which are local ones.

Please note that RoboHelp 11 takes care of the syncing and sharing process between the RH project and the folders in the resource manager. If you need to do any operation on your cloud files such as sharing a URL for a file or sharing a folder, you need to follow the workflows of respective cloud services.

I hope you will find this feature useful in your collaboration workflows. In RoboHelp 11, we have also enabled topic sharing in the resource manager, which I will cover in one of the blogs later.

Stay tuned for more !

Vikram Verma

Product Manager, Adobe Technical Communication Products