Team System for Tech Writers

Melanie wrote in to ask me, “I am trying to find information on, examples of, how technical writers or documentation departments have fit themselves into the dev process using [Team System].” This question has arisen a few times in e-mail and in the MSDN Forums.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an integrated, turnkey solution for writing documentation in this version of Team System (much to my chagrin). In the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, we are shipping a copy of HelpStudio Lite:

HelpStudio Lite Authoring Tool

The Visual Studio 2005 SDK includes a new tool that allows authoring, building, and deployment of documentation to be plugged into Visual Studio. The tool, HelpStudio Lite, is a slimmed down version of the Innovasys HelpStudio product. HelpStudio Lite is optimized for users of the Visual Studio SDK to author and deploy Help content. After installing the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, you can launch HelpStudio Lite from the Windows Start Menu.

Team System is a platform for software development innovation, but Team Foundation Server goes beyond that. It is a foundation for developing just about any kind of collaborative work environment that requires work management, version control, compiled output, or reporting.

For example, you could use:

• Team Foundation Work Item Tracking to manage your documentation project by creating custom work item types that are appropriate for working with text instead of code, and
• Team Foundation Version Control to manage for your help content source files, and
• Team Foundation Build to build your HxS or CHM projects, if you can use MSBuild to automate your documentation build system, and
• Team Foundation Reporting to monitor the progress of your content project, and
• Process templates to create and manage team projects optimized for documentation projects, or simply incorporate documentation into your existing process template.

Essentially, you could construct an entire content development system with Team Foundation as its base.

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• Anonymous
  January 30, 2006
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