Launch project from SharePoint

[Paul Elbertse]

Good afternoon,

In our company it has been decided to store all our documents in a SharePoint document library instead of using a share.
All of my Help and Manual source data is also on a share.
Is it (technically) possible and/or advisable to also move all these files to SharePoint? This would mean that I would launch a xxx.xmxp file from SharePoint. Publishing would than also be done within this SharePoint environment.
I guess the answer is "do not do this" or "this is not possible" but I reallly need the experts opinion.
I you need more information or if I am not clear, please let me know.

Thanks for your time.

Regards,
Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

Is it (technically) possible and/or advisable to also move all these files to SharePoint? This would mean that I would launch a xxx.xmxp file from SharePoint. Publishing would than also be done within this SharePoint environment.

SharePoint doesn't know anything about Help+Manual and Help+Manual doesn't know anything about SharePoint. So this is only advisable if SharePoint does absolutely nothing to your files. If it changes them in any way, changes their properties or adds its own files to your projects then you shouldn't do it.

However, configurations that have SharePoint often also have Team Foundation Server (TFS) version control systems installed, and Help+Manual does support that actively. See here for details:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... cs_tfs.htm

It makes much more sense to put your projects in TFS, even though SubVersion would really be preferable.

[Paul Elbertse]

Tim,

Thanks for your reply.
I have read some things in your manual about TFS and the first thing I saw was that when using TFS it is needed that a working copy is stored locally. This is exactly the problem I have. Our company does not want to use any share anymore and wrting to a local drive is not possible already anyway. So either they let us keep a share for our projects or this is the end for our use of Help and Manual.

Regards,
Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

That's unfortunate because working on a network for any reason is always much slower than working locally. One of the huge benefits of using version control is that you don't need to work on the network any more and you get the full advantages of the local speed of your machine.

However, I'm also discussing this with our developers responsible for all the data storage and network components, so hopefully I'll be able to provide some more detailed information here shortly. I'll keep you posted.

[Tim Green]

Update: Our developers confirm that you should not under any circumstances try to store, edit or load your Help+Manual projects in SharePoint. It is designed primarily for Office documents and will not handle other types of data well. It is also quite likely that it has a simple kind of internal versioning that could easily damage or change your projects in unpredictable ways.

[Paul Elbertse]

Hi Tim,

Thank you very much for the update.
This is a very important message for me.

Paul

[TonySosi]

Update: Our developers confirm that you should not under any circumstances try to store, edit or load your Help+Manual projects in SharePoint. It is designed primarily for Office documents and will not handle other types of data well. It is also quite likely that it has a simple kind of internal versioning that could easily damage or change your projects in unpredictable ways.

Is this still the case?

[Tim Green]

Is this still the case?

Help & Manual does not interface with Sharepoint for document collaboration, and this is also not required. It has its own multi-user editing support. There is no need to store a shared copy in Sharepoint to be able to work on documents together in a team. You could archive your projects in Sharepoint, but you should not try to collaborate directly on Help+Manual projects from within Sharepoint using Sharepoint's document collaboration tools. Instead, you need to use Help+Manual's own collaboration support when you are working in a local network:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_m ... iting.html

As far as the output you produce is concerned, the skins in the Premium Pack add-on support a certain amount of integration in SharePoint, but we really don't recommend using it. SharePoint pretends to be a web server but in typical Microsoft manner it isn't really, and isn't compatible with anything else in the world. It is much better to put your WebHelp on a real web server and just link to it. If you are forced to do this for some reason, you need one of the compatible Premium Pack skins and the following instructions

https://www.it-authoring.com/info/pp5he ... point.html

[TonySosi]

Many thanks for that Tim. If only ONE user was accessing the project file, do you envisage any impediment to launching from SharePoint?

[Tim Green]

Many thanks for that Tim. If only ONE user was accessing the project file, do you envisage any impediment to launching from SharePoint?

I'm afraid I don't know because, as mentioned, don't support SharePoint and have no plans to do so, but I would be very cautious. You should be using the uncompressed HMXP format, but SharePoint knows nothing about Help+Manual's XML schema and both Microsoft in general and SharePoint in particular are notorious for not respecting other people's XML. It is quite possible that SharePoint might try to inject its own incompatible XML, which could have unexpected results and cause all kinds of issues.