A workflow engineered:

• to capture, organize and update activity related knowledge,
  

• to publish manuals and on-line helps.
  

Unlike its competitors, TimBox sharply seprates information from documentation. The domain expert deals with tasks in Wisiwym mode (thereby only considering the content he enters and not the layout of documents to be published).

TimBox puts the whole power of XML structuring into this flow whereas no XML tags are ever visible for the domain expert (who, after all, is not likely to be a publishing expert). This strategy is enhanced by the following facilities:

In the authoring process

For the setting up of a task hierarchy,

• task libraries enabling task reuse,
• task copying and cloning,
• task moving within the task tree in graphical mode,
• task type identification (conditional, cyclic, etc.).

For the description of the tasks populating the task tree (prerequisites, input, output, post-requisites, procedure,

• library of often-used expressions,
• multiple image integration methods,
• means to attach several procedures  to the same task,
• information about the environment related to task engagement.

How?

• by standard manipulation of the tree  hosting the tasks,
• by form-guided information typing when describing  tasks,
• by allowing breadth-first or depth-first analysis.

In the publishing process:

• Easy selection of the information to be published from the information that has been entered,
• Selection of the publishing format (paper, screen),
• Specification of the look and feel of the document to be published or production of an XML source to be used as an input for refined desktop publishing systems.

How?

• by applying a pre-defined stylesheet (XSLT, CSS),
• by choosing an appropriate export format (PDF, XML, HTML, CHM).