Last week Sarah Maddox and I were fortunate enough to get a personal demo of WebWorks' ePublisher platform from Ben Allums and Alan Porter at WebWorks.

ePublisher bills itself as an online conversion platform that transforms FrameMaker, Word, and DITA-XML content into Web and online help deliverables. In their latest release, ePublisher 2009.2, WebWorks added the ability for ePublisher to publish FrameMaker, Word, and DITA-XML content to Confluence.

Say you want to publish your documentation to a customer-facing wiki but your product documentation writers do all their work in Framemaker or Word. With this latest release, ePublisher you can publish all that trapped content to a Confluence wiki where customers can easily interact with it, comment on it or even edit it.

While our technical writers at Atlassian do pretty much all their writing inside of Confluence, technical writers at many organisations still use client-side editors like Framemaker or Word. With ePublisher, you can do a one-time content migration, create a schedule to do periodic publishing or define triggers to do the automated publishing (say with every software build that gets kicked off for example). It's a very flexible tool and a great way to have the best of two worlds...the rich authoring features of a client-side app with the lightweight, easy access of a wiki.

To learn more about ePublisher, check out WebWorks' website or watch the recording below.