Document management tools or processes

Subject: Document management tools or processes
From: Melissa Lowery <melissa -dot- lowery -at- CAPITALONE -dot- COM>
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 16:26:30 -0500

TECHWR-Lers:

I need recommendations for document management tools or processes.
Here is the situation I am in:

Three months ago I started a new job where my primary assignment has
been to help our Analysis and Design team revamp their documentation
process. This team does initial planning and design work for other
teams that create servers for internal deployment. The A&D team is
often working on various planning stages for three different server
releases at once. They create the same types of documents for each
release. Their documents consist of about 5-7 different types of
information that is often cut and pasted from very large "master"
documents and then cut and pasted back into the large documents once
the servers are actually developed. They had been maintaining all of
their information (business classes, API reference material,
structures, etc.) as very large Word documents (213, 240, and 150 pp.
respectively).

My first move was to break these huge documents up into their
component pieces (they were complaining that it was hard to scroll
through the big documents--I can't imagine why, since we all know how
well Word handles long documents ;-0). I am using MasterView to
recreate the long documents when it is necessary to "publish" a
document for internal reference. I need to be able to maintain
multiple versions for each chunk since I will need to "publish" a
document version for each server version, even though the same
document piece may be changed in each of the three releases currently
in development.

I need to find a tool or process to help me store and track revisions
for these component pieces. One of the A&D team members is really
pushing hard for me to use PVCS to manage this task. I have read on
this list before that this is not a very good tool for documents
because it was really designed for source code, not binary files. My
PVCS administrator here is very much against using it because of the
file sizes involved and the limited disk space that has been assigned
for PVCS on our server. Does anyone have any specific experience using
PVCS or some other more appropriate tool to track multiple revisions
of document components. Unfortunately, price and ease of installation
are two factors I have to consider since I do not have unlimited
resources to do this (i.e. suggesting a tool that costs $10,000 or
requires a specialist to implement is of no use to me). Any
suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated. I will be glad to
summarize all responses to the list. Thanks!

Melissa Lowery
Technical Writer, Capital One
melissa -dot- lowery -at- capitalone -dot- com

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