Synonyms could take some time to set up but but the creation of the word searching is as long as it takes ZoomSearch to trawl through all the topics, Word documents and PDFs. I ran it across a pretty large repository of documents and at most it was an hour or so including all the uploading etc.

I wonder if they have a fixed idea of what they want and have not tried ZoomSearch on their users to see if, shock horror, it finds what the users are looking for.

I don’t have a comparison to offer. I am sure you have seen MergeThis post on the RH forums and I know he is sold on ZoomSearch. Uses the categories that I haven’t played with. When it didn’t do something quite as he needed, he emailed the developers and they tweaked the product for him. Might be worth another post there.

Believe it or not, they wanted a better NLS, not just indexing and word stemming. They decided that the synonyms weren’t capable enough in this one for the rollout they were doing because it would take a bit more time down the line to customize it on an ongoing basis.

Maybe they didn’t like the time estimate in how long it takes to maintain it, or something else they didn’t tell me. I think they really liked going to a one-stop solution. RH Server was complex however, and server support at Adobe wasn’t thrilling them either.

If you have any great tips or a comparison between the RH Server and ZoomSearch I will quickly pass them onto my client!

Out of interest, what was it they didn’t like, surely not the price tag?

Thank you, I liked the $300 solution but one of my clients didn’t so I’m back to the drawing board… Thought since you posted here you might have some further ideas.

Feel free to offline me.

My question is:
Any ideas about that previous issue I have had with the RH server capability?

I had worked with Pro.Techwriter on trying to find out what was going on when the problem was posted on the RoboHelp forums. What was being reported about what Support had said was at variance with my understanding and with what someone else in Support had said to me. I wanted to investigate to find out the true answer as well as to help Pro.Techwriter. After a number of posts, I was sent part of the project and was able to confirm for myself that a relative link in the TOC to an external topic, including a topic in another project in a webmerge setup, worked in X5 but not RH6.

On 11 April I contacted Adobe saying that this issue was a real problem and needed to be addressed. On 19 April I advised Pro.Techwriter that a patch had been produced (just 8 days later) and that I had tried it on her project and it worked. By that time a decision had been made by Pro.Techwriter not to proceed with RoboHelp which is of course her right. However, to post on 27 April “we validated that the relative links in the TOC would not work, no how, no way” is, in my opinion, grossly unfair. At one point that was true but 8 days earlier I had advised a patch was available that did fix the problem on the part of the project I had.

Pro.Techwriter was not free to post about the patch at that point but to give the impression that there is an unresolved issue is wrong. At the time Support were contacted, they could not say a patch was being worked on because that only started later.

The patch also fixes the problem that has been reported about generating help when a project has merged cells in a table and a build expression is used. It is available from Adobe Technical Support and from my site.

This issue has made my life a living h311, as I have just finished building a documentation intranet using RH5, with merged WebHelp that has thousands of topics and links. Due to the lost functionality, I may have to start over.

The story: Merged Webhelp was created with a main project and about 15 subprojects. One subproject contained the majority of the HTML documents (with PDF attachments) to meet our business requirement of maintaining one copy (and one only) of each document. Other subprojects linked back to those topics. Now, the subproject-to-subproject linking does still work, but relative links in the table of contents are no longer supported. And, I have LOTS of those.

Guess what? I am looking for a new tool, and I have nearly a year’s worth of work down the drain.

How often does a software release REMOVE functionality that you’ve had for years?

Note: It’s not for lack of trying. Tech support has looked at the issue. Also, Peter Grainge has worked extensively on this issue and determined that some file errors that made it through without too many consequences in RH5 will not “pass” in RH6, so some problems were on my end during conversion. Subproject-to-subproject linking works. However, we validated that the relative links in the TOC would not work, no how, no way, however. For more information about using RH6, see Peter’s site at grainge.org.