Migrate from Adobe RoboHelp to AEM Guides

[prhmusic]

Currently, I use Adobe RoboHelp 2015 to distribute IT Disaster Recovery documentation. While I edit HTML files with Dreamweaver, the majority of the DR info is stored throughout 1000s of Word files stored in a network folder structure. The SMEs edit those Word info with the info they need to restore their system if there's been a disaster. I link all of those SME-edited Word files to my RoboHelp project - when the SME makes a change, the icon next to the linked Word file in RoboHelp changes its color from Green to Yellow so I know that it's time to re-publish the RoboHelp as a browser-based output.

I have been seeing "AEM Guides" everywhere in Adobe marketing - just got the invite to the conference in Las Vegas! - but I don't understand what it is. I'm looking for some simple answers to what I hope are some simple questions. 
Specifically:
-- Is AEM Guides a replacement for traditional Help Authoring Tools (HAT) like RoboHelp?
-- What are the output options, meaning, could I use this product to generate a browser-based output?
-- Could my SMEs still edit their Word files and have that content included?
-- If there is DR info stored in file types, such as PDFs, Excel, Visio, text files (there's others), could I include those files?

I apologize if all of these answers are readily available and I've just not seen it.

Thank you for your assistance.

[Keith_Nicolson]

I wouldn't call it a "replacement", perhaps "alternative" is more suitable.  AEM Guides allows you to author content in DITA XML i.e. ditamaps, topics, images (inc video).

You can then publish your DITA content to a wide variety of outputs:

- PDF using either Adobe's Native PDF generator or the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT). There are default stylesheets, but most will customise.

- HTML

- Webhelp

- Epub

- AEM Sites i.e. direct to a publish instance of AEM

And many more.

AEM Guides includes an excellent web editor to allow your team to authors their content in the web browser or you can use desktop Adobe FrameMaker or oxYgen XML Author.

There is a Word2Dita conversion available, but it is basic and the DITA would probably need tweaking after conversion.  If the topics are fairly small in size you can copy and paste from Word into the AEM Web Editor or oXygen.

DITA supports "resource files".  These are file types (Word, Excel, PDF) that are not native DITA, but can be included in your outputs.