Adobe RoboHelp Reviews & Product Details - Page 4

Dynamic Filtering is my favorite feature of RoboHelp (2015 Release), saving many hours and effort of authoring time, as well as providing a great experience for the user. Dynamic filters allow users to narrow down the topics to be displayed in the Table of Contents similar to how they can narrow down which shirt to buy on a clothing web site by size or color. For example, say you have a help app for explaining tips on being productive. The user might want to see just tips relating to their Headquarters Office (HQ) location and just relating to Managers. By clicking both these boxes and then viewing the Table of Contents, they will only see tips for HQ Managers.

This feature makes use of the conditional build tags that current authors are familiar with. If I were to accomplish this in the prior release, I would have had to use conditional tags with multiple outputs, or perhaps had several books in the table of contents with what I thought the relevant content would be, or would have had to use the WebHelp output in order to use content categories, or perhaps some other solution. None of those solutions would accommodate all the possible outcomes that the user might want and would have resulted in possibly many outputs, which means more publishing time and effort on my part, which is not desirable. Now, I can have one simple table of contents and the users can click the Filter icon and decide real-time what they want to see! It’s fantastic.

Filters are quite flexible. In addition, you can hide the filters if you don’t want this feature to display, set a default filter selection, and allow multiple selections or only one selection. Note that this feature is in the new Responsive Design Layout, which brings me to the next favorite. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It creates documents instead of pages in SharePoint when you integrate with SharePoint. This prevents the user from seeing the changes in the SharePoint page history screen. This may not be important but is just something I've noticed and would have liked to seen handled a different way. You can view track changes via MS Word, so there are ways around that, which may or may not be better depending upon your personal opinion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

+ Many companies have RoboHelp, know it, and use it. If you have a problem or question about it, you can probably find someone who can help you.

+ RoboHelp is a pretty stable, mature tool. Adobe does a good job of maintaining it.

+ Among the world of help authoring tools, RoboHelp is fairly easy to learn and use (though I would not say it is trivial).

TIP: If you choose it, consider investing in formal training--ideally in-person classroom training if your management will approve it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- I don't find it as feature-rich and flexible as some other help authoring tools.

- I don't find it well-documented. It was hard for me to find good, comprehensive user manuals for it. Best way to get these is to enroll in formal training. (Refer to my tip above.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest advantage of using RoboHelp is the integration with our primary documentation tool, Adobe Framemaker. All of our standard documentation is written and maintained in Framemaker, so RoboHelp made the transition from user guides to help files relatively painless.

The fact that RoboHelp inherited the navigation structure from Framemaker can save you substantial time as long as you structure your Framemaker documents in a way that will be conducive to web help navigation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There were a couple of things about RoboHelp that we as a team did not like:

1. It seemed like the import from Framemaker would arbitrarily fail sometimes. We would run the import and it would fail, then we would run it again immediately after and it would succeed. This was annoying, and it was a constant kickoff point for our "is there a better solution than Robohelp" discussions. That having been said, with enough attempts we could always import our Framemaker files successfully, so it was more of an annoyance than a real obstacle.

2. The built in templates and styles are not very good. Styles can be updated and tweaked, but that requires knowledge of CSS and HTML. While these skills are becoming more and more prevalent these days, not all documentation team members possess them. If your team does not have someone who knows how to format and style web content, then you will be stuck using very dated-looking user interfaces. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RoboHelp does a decent job of producing online help in various formats including HTMLHelp (.chm) and WebHelp. RoboHelp for Word works for anyone still producing the obsolete WinHelp 4 format.

The tool is relatively easy to use and works fairly well. You can easily manage things such as multiple table of contents files and multiple index files if you are producing versions of an online help system. I have an older project that I still maintain in RoboHelp and it has four different versions each requiring its own ToC and Index.

The WebHelp output is a standard tri-pane design, and if you are fluent in .css you can make it look decent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While RoboHelp works okay it is not a state of the art tool. It does not have a full complement or suite of additional tools that can help with all aspects of the authoring process.

I've used both RoboHelp and AuthorIT and have switched from those tools to MadCap Flare which was a wonderful suite of tools that make the development process far more efficient.

The online help for RoboHelp (similar to all Adobe help) leaves quite a bit to be desired. It is slow and difficult to find the info you need. I've often just used Google to find an answer instead of using the RoboHelp help system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the flexibility of deciding what buttons display, what icons I use for display, and how to help appears and functions for the end user. I can decide right out of the box how the user interface is going to function based on my company's needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You still must know some HTML in order to use RoboHelp, because if you don't, you are going to have great difficulty in formatting - wrong words will get bolded and underlined. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

WYSIWYG environment, pods, and topic list. These make content so much easier and pleasant to work with! There are so many templates you can customize to get the look and feel you want, the the html view is great for troubleshooting.

The image mapping capability is a gem--there is none simpler and it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Other pluses:

You can easily see which topics are linked, so you know if it's okay to delete something.

Simplicity of creating and managing keywords Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After working in a content management system, I find that the snippets fall short of real content management and re-usability. With multiple authors working on a large complex help system, it is too difficult to find reusable content so content is often recreated, causing problems when updates are needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After using other software packages to publish on-demand help/searchable databases, RoboHelp has proven to be far and above better than hand-coding and making it easy to reach ALL my users regardless of device. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the interface has remained stable...it seems a bit dated (although unsure about the 2015 release). I've had some difficulty leveraging CSS3 for sizing images...but was able to include simple code to fix it. Other than that, simply don't have many things I "dislike". Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's versitilty. I created dynamic courses using all the tools available with awesome custom graphics and java script dropdown Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I was using RH10 and the crashing problems seemed to be fixed. So it worked well with no issues Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.