Documentation tools which integrate with Sharepoint?

Question

Are there any documentation tools that easily integrate with Sharepoint 2007? With integrate I mean, that the tool provides means of publishing documentation to Sharepoint 2007 which are indexed and searchable from within Sharepoint.

BTW: We use currently use HelpStudio.

Answer 1

There is two parts to this

1. Publishing to SharePoint - I'm not aware any that publish to SharePoint but most publish to a network location, and remember your document libraries can be exposed as network locations.
2. Search/Indexing - All searching/indexing is done via IFilters, so provided you have the IFilter SharePoint can handle it, regardless of how it gets in. A quick Google search turns up plenty of ifilters like one for HLP Help files, MHT Files and CHM Files

As a personal note, what I have used in the past is SandCastle for my documentation, which can produce HTML files which I put in via the network share method and that is handled by the out of the box solution.

Answer 2

Good question! There simply is no such tool available from Microsoft or any other company. I have on several occasions asked Microsoft the same question and what tool they use to generate the documentation they deliver with SharePoint. But nobody seems to know although I am sure they must at least have some internal tool to build the documentation. The best I have been able to find so far is this: Integrating Custom Help Pages to the SharePoint 2007 Help System

Answer 3

We have implemented Hyper.Net to do automated document conversion and SharePoint publishing. It is a very powerful tool.