Re: Distributed authoring using Word and Domino?

Subject: Re: Distributed authoring using Word and Domino?
From: Robert_Johnson -at- percussion -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 09:00:07 -0400


geoff -at- userdox -dot- com tells us he has "been asked
to make a list of issues associated with a distributed authoring
environment
using Word and Domino."

Before going any further, I'd ask for more definition about this
"distributed authoring environment". Is the idea to do the authoring in
Notes and then crank the output to Word? Or is it to use Notes to store
and manage the Word documents? Niether approach strikes me as a very
effective approach to authoring technical documents.

Let's take the Notes to Word case. A Notes database is essentially a
collection of Notes documents. While you can define Views that impose
some sense of organization on these documents, defining a structure for
these is extraordinarily awkward, to say the least. Furthermore, even if
you could export the documents, the exported ASCII would preserve order,
but not hierarchy. You would still have a lot of work to impose structure
on the resulting document.

The problem is not too much better if the idea is to author in Word and
use Notes to store and manage the documents. While you can use add-ons to
provide workflow in Notes, Domino is not really set up to provide version
control, and you would still have the problem of merging the content
documents to produce the final output.

Among my company's products is a line of Notes tools, and we are a very
Notes-centric company. We use Notes to manage both our development and
our documentation processes, and also as a distribution mechanism for
released documentation. If it were practical to use Notes to author and
produce our documentation, we would do so. We do not.

Bob Johnson
Documentation Specialist
Percussion Software
Stoneham, MA

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