Should read - John is very careful to mention in his article that people should test the server prior to rolling it out. That sounds like caveat emptor to me in a very respectful tone.

Yeah, check out this article link written by John Daigle. He is very careful to mention I put up a link within the forums to this location.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/rhserver_06.html
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The Natural Language Search facility of older versions has been replaced. The new full text search facility is an important change for those upgrading from an older version of the RoboEngine. The natural language search concept seemed like a good idea years ago, but never caught on because users were more familiar with keyword searches. Since the natural language search technique often confused users, it has been replaced.

Upgrade Tip #1: Upgraders will want to “archive” their older feedback reports before the change takes place, because the RoboHelp Server 6 database will replace the older RoboEngine database.
Upgrade Tip #2: Those upgrading to RoboHelp Server 6 will want to let users know that rather than entering questions, they should use keywords for their search terms.

Upgrade Tip #3: A best practice would be to set up a test server and publish your existing content. In this way, you can anticipate any rollout changes you want to make.

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To me, John seems to be giving a clear ‘caveat emptor’ warning here about checking the results for yourself. What I would do, as a client, is install both RH servers and have my test team try the past three months of previously entered content to see how well the new one compared to the old one.

Questions then arise about a ‘forced upgrade’ possibility.

About me:

My history with eHelp started in 2002, and I proposed a change in the natural search engine back then. The strengths I was looking to add to the product were to support multiple byte language sets such as Japanese, Chinese, Greek (i think) and Cyrillic, along with improving the natural language search capabilities. We were even demo’ing a desktop search utility two years prior to Google’s Desktop Search. That’s innovation, and

That idea was still in evaluation when Macromedia purchased eHelp, and I departed prior to the finalization of the sale.

I use many Adobe products, and Captivate 2 is my current breadwinner. I maintain several RoboHelp generated websites, and have used it for nearly eight years. I like both companies, and maintain friendships with developers with both (just not at the same time). The strengths that eHelp staff have brought to Macromedia, and then Adobe (those who survived the purge) are still evident in the products which they designed. So yes, I like both, and try to play well with others.

Search just happens to have been a focus of mine as a new technology for well before Google came to the forefront. My private company had been researching this as a core ‘disruptive technology’ since well before 2002 and had made several inroads into licensing a technology before I had begun to work at eHelp.

I can speak volumes about the testing my company did with the servers and although it’s a parallel development we did approach Google with the Desktop search concept prior to their Google Desktop Search. That adds to an ownership I feel, like our interest contributed to that simple desktop tool which helps so many people with file management.

– Charles Jeter
aka eHelpCharlesJet (AIM from way back when)

I don’t know a lot about it yet, so I’ve gotta do some poking around. I’ll probably post a thread about it soon & start a discussion on it.

Welcome to my hell of an evaluation. I’m now going to have to evaluate RH6 Server - does anyone have any idea about the natural language search and why it’s not available in this version?!? Are synonyms completely gone now?

Is Adobe going back to text-only search capability? What other features are degraded - will it still build a searchable index of other locations within the server, and if there’s not natural language search, are we just looking at a ‘reporting box’ which Awstats from my linux apache server could do just as well?!?

WTF - feel free to start a new thread about search integrated into with your results. I figure you’re better informed than I am. I’m not seeing info on the search functionality.

Sigh.

This is why I’m frustrated with RH and the new release. It’s like - I get to tell one of them, well, you own three platinum level support packages from 2004 for RH5 but the webhelp doesn’t work as well without security issues. Good news for them - their display platforms haven’t moved away from NT so they’re stuck with browser versions that are compatible also.

The other one is not so easy. I have to be on hand during a meeting to tell whether or not the help authoring tools out there will do what they want to do. They want to integrate help with demo movies into a brand new web application. The paths of discussion will be two - first, the benefits of a properly designed instructional help file / tutorial, and second, which software does the trick.

So at the end of the day they all know the RoboHelp brand name, but the product won’t support what they eventually need to do - Vista and Word 2007 compatibility.

Great news for me? The facts are that both clients will probably say to me, get it done, we don’t care how, we’ll pay you to maintain the file. I win, of course. But the clients lose the ability to organically modify their own files. When they need to do updates, they’ll always come knocking.

Why? Because at this point in the market tying oneself to a specific authoring tool may be a fight that decision makers accountable to the upper management may not want to make. Hire a specialist, get it done, fixed cost versus training an internal asset in what may become a dead language.