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For what its worth, I'm in the same situation you're in. We decided to only
allow customizations of the docs if clients purchased one of our "branding"
services (which also includes application customizations). Depending on the
level of service they choose, that either gets them the RTF/Word source, or
it means that I customize the docs per their specifications.
It made me crazy at first to send off my document source to another shop - I
figure if they can't make application changes themselves, they shouldn't be
able to make doc changes themselves. But hey, if giving them the docs makes
them happy customers, then they can have them.
Besides, doing custom docs can be a huge maintenance nightmare. Someone
mentioned the possibility of using single-sourcing to help manage in-house
customization - this is what I'm doing, and while it does help
significantly, there's always going to be an overhead when you customize for
multiple clients. Just keep that in mind as you make your recommendations.
Oh - and as for the Frame to Word issue - why is it so time consuming? Is it
because you're trying to retain exact formatting (and is that necessary -
can you tell the client if they want Word they're taking their chances)?
Would it be faster to convert to RTF? Isn't there any way to automate the
process of conversion?
Jennifer Westerberg
Kurant Corporation
jen -at- kurant -dot- com
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