Forefront software assists ‘help’ writers, programmers

BOULDER — When ForeFront Inc., a privately owned Boulder-based software developer, started putting together help-authoring software in 1993, “There were no bona fide tools out there,´ said David Granger, the company’s president. At that time, help authors – primarily technical writers and independent software developers – employed Microsoft Word for the task, a technique that equated to working in what Granger called a “foreign environment.”
Enter ForeFront’s flagship product ForeHelp, an authoring tool geared toward the specific needs of the help writer. “Our product is designed for indexing and contextual indexing type of things,” Granger said, describing what sets ForeFront’s products apart from traditional word processors. More recently, as help has made the move from the desktop to the Internet, such features also have differentiated ForeFront’s products from standard HTML-authoring products.
“There are six features (of ForeHelp) that traditional HTML-authoring software doesn’t offer,´ said ForeFront Director of Marketing Kathy Wolfskill. The six features are keyword search, full-text search, a “Related Topics” option, pop-up topics, a collapsible table of contents, and secondary windows (which allows for two or more help windows to be open at once.) “Those six features are really what set apart a help-authoring project from a regular HTML project,” she added.
ForeFront’s market consists primarily of technical writers and independent programmers, but “30 percent of our customer base” are corporations using ForeFront’s applications for internal documentation not associated with online help, Granger explained.
“One of our very early customers in ’94 was an insurance company,” a firm that used ForeFront’s products to post internal policy in a help environment. Wolfskill noted that several companies have used ForeFront tools in the construction of online catalogs, including Acura’s online parts catalog.
The proliferation of the Internet, in tandem with the increasing corporate tendency to go online, brought translation difficulties with it to the world of help authoring. “Basically all the people are coming from an old style of help to HTML help,” Wolfskill explained, “and that has opened a huge can of worms.”
“The corporate people are pretty confused right now,” Granger said. “We take a lot of heat from these people that the newer technologies (such as HTML and Java) are not as developed as the older technology. The key is to provide these people with a tool that they can target these different platforms and still get all these elements they’re used to using on a different system.”
The company’s new ForeHelp Premier 2000 product suite is geared toward compatibility with numerous platforms and applications, with an end goal of translating internal help systems to the Internet without a hiccup, Wolfskill said. She further touted the product’s “nifty reporting tools” and a learning curve that can be traversed “quickly and painlessly.”
“(ForeHelp) is the product I prefer to use,´ said Diane Weskalnies, an independent technical writer based in Lafayette, citing ease of use, straightforward pricing and standout customer service. “Their customer service is very responsive to answer the problem, even when it is not specifically related to their product.”
Dave Gash, a Dallas-based help trainer who does business as Hypertrain.com, commented, “ForeHelp users are rather evangelical about it,” due to an easy-to-use interface that lets you configure topics as part of a larger project, rather than as individual files.
The company has cooperative alliances in place with such industry stalwarts as Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems and Borland/Inprise. Of these partnerships, Granger explained, “Basically what happens is they’re pushing these technologies. They want to align themselves with credible tools vendors.” These relationships are a two-way street, providing benefits to both parties, Granger continued, noting, “We want the same thing.”
Sun Microsystems’ alliance with ForeFront revolves around a Web-based JavaHelp Center at www.forehelp.com. Microsoft’s vendor relations group meets with ForeFront to keep the 14-employee company “up to speed” on relevant product developments at the software giant, Granger said.
Looking ahead, Granger predicted, “I think the biggest challenge is to keep up with the fast evolution our market is going through.” Citing the near-daily occurrence of newly adopted HTML standards, he noted, “We need to continue to supply our customers with ‘value adds.’ We certainly don’t want to become one of the 2,700 or 27,000 HTML-authoring suppliers.” For the coming year, the company is looking primarily at riding the crest of industry change while streamlining the automation of its existing products.
The help-authoring software market is primed for a boom, observed Diane Weskalnies, noting, “Companies are finding it cheaper to provide online help than it is to provide print information.” That realization, while not entirely new, will continue to define ForeFront’s market in coming years.