Documentation review process and tools? (in Frame)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Cedric Simard's company uses FrameMaker to create documentation, and <<...
nearly 20 people have to review different parts of each piece of
documentation before sending to customers. How would you proceed?>>

Keith Soltys recently wrote about a plug-in for tracking changes directly in
Frame (www.soltys.ca/techcomm/software_reviews/Track_Changes_plugin.htm)
that might prove helpful if everyone else is working in Frame too. If not,
it might be worthwhile creating your initial drafts in Word (I'm assuming
that's what they reviewers are using, since you mentioned trying to export
from Frame to Microsoft RTF) and using Word's revision tracking tools. Once
you've got near-final approval of the drafts, you can then pour the text
into Frame for layout. This workflow (edit in word processor before going to
layout) is arguably less efficient than the more modern practice of working
from beginning to end in the desktop publishing (DTP) software, but is
nonetheless a proven approach that works very well indeed, and particularly
so if the reviewers don't use the DTP. On-paper reviews are another, even
less-efficient approach, but it works just fine, and many reviewers will
actually do a better job working on paper than working online. (Spoken as a
veteran of the "how could a reviewer miss such a gross error?" school of
hard knocks.)

A more relevant approach if the reviews are primarily technical and
"political" rather than actual copyedits (i.e., you expect relatively minor
changes) might be to use Acrobat to produce and distribute a PDF file.
"Acrobat Business Tools" provides a relatively low-cost solution; if you
equip every reviewer with a copy, they can then annotate the PDF files
extensively without ever altering your original information, which is still
safe in Frame. Given some of the errors I've seen introduced in peer review,
and the ease of catching such errors when the reviewers can't muck with the
original file behind your back, an approach based on the PDF files has much
to recommend it.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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