Adobe released Adobe RoboHelp 11 last week. Over the next few weeks, I'll be covering some of hottest new features. This week: sharing resources via the Cloud (specifically, with Dropbox).
Sharing resources isn't a new concept in RoboHelp. In fact, the Resource Manager pod has been around for the past few versions of RoboHelp. What's new in RoboHelp 11 is the ability to specify a Dropbox as a folder on the Resource Manager.
To begin, visited
Dropbox.com and created an account. I also created a folder in Dropbox and set it up as a share object (both tasks, creating and sharing the folder, were simple and took mere seconds).
Once my Dropbox account had been set up, I started RoboHelp 11 and chose View > Pods > Resource Manager. From the top of the Resource Manager pod, I clicked the Add Shared Location tool.
In the Add Shared Location dialog box, I clicked theLocation type drop-down menu and selected Dropbox. (Each time I've performed this step over the past few weeks, RoboHelp has consistently loaded my Dropbox folder and Path for me. Alternatively, you can click the Browse button and manually locate your Dropbox folder.)
The next step was to add content to my shared Dropbox folder on the RoboHelp Resource Manager. My shared Dropbox folder is called SharedRoboHelpTopics. When I dragged a topic (Alcohol_Policy) to the shared folder, I was delighted to see that in addition to the topic, the Cascading Style Sheet being used by the topic (policies.css) was also added to the shared folder.
One of my team members (Biff Bifferson), who is located in another state, was working on a RoboHelp project and needed to use some of my content. While we don't share a network connection, we both have Dropbox accounts. I accessed my Dropbox account and sent Biff an invite to my SharedRoboHelpTopics folder.
Biff checked his email and added the SharedRoboHelpTopics folder to his Dropbox. Biff then used RoboHelp's Resource Manager pod to add his Dropbox as a Shared Location.
Since his Dropbox included my shared folder, Biff's Resource Manager immediately displayed my shared resources.
To add my shared content to his RoboHelp project, Biff right-clicked the Alcohol_Policy topic on the Resource Manager pod and chose Add to Project.
Like magic, my content was now being used in two projects in two different locations. What do you think? Cool?
But then… then… I edited the topic on my computer. (I know, crazy right?)
My Resource Manager alerted me that my shared assets weren't synchronized (via the red icon shown in the image below). When content isn't synchronized, it's likely that team members aren't using the same content.
Because I wanted to ensure that both Biff and I were working with the same assets, I right-clicked the topic on my Resources Manager and selected Sync.
Green check marks indicated that all was well between the content in my RoboHelp project and the assets in my Dropbox. But I was curious to learn if Biff actually got the updated content in his project. And if so, what was his experience? Was it painful?
It turns out that Biff's experience was almost, well, routine. He told me that when he opened his project with RoboHelp 11 later that day, he was greeted with the Linked Resource Notification dialog box shown below. All he had to do was click the Update button and his content was automatically synchronized with mine. In a word… that's awesome!
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