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Actually, Book is a pretty powerful tool, and, properly used, is really good
about enforcing structural and formatting consivtency among manuals. *And* can
handle large mauals without batting an eye. The GML is pretty simple to
understand; if you can do HTML, you can do Book.
But to the question at hand - to get your company to change over, you're going
to have to consider a number of items in your conversion proposal, other than
the fact that you dont like Book.
* which dtp tool are you going to go to - and how familiar are the writers and
other users with the tool of choice? what costs are there in rolling out the new
tool? who will support it (hardware, system, and tool admiistration)? how much
will the new tool increase productivity? how much will the new tool affect
existing procedures for documentation?
* how much is it going to cost to covert from the old format to the new - what
are the time and labor costs to write or implement conversion routines, perform
the conversions, and verify the conversion and fix the residual conversion
errors (which invariably happen when converting from any media/format to
another). Also consider the time and labor that will be lost from other projects
while performing the conversion.
Until you consider the cold equations, any thoughts about conversion are just
going to be whimsy.
----- Original Message -----
From: <Jfuller246 -at- aol -dot- com>
>
> I work for a large company (1,700 employees) that still uses IBM BookMaster
for all manuals. Help! It is the most archaic un-user-friendly piece of software
I've used in a long time. The BookMaster manual was last updated in the late
1980s. I can't believe I'm thinking this, but I miss MS Word!
>
> I've asked the other writers about this. They looked into updating the tools
several years ago, but nothing could handle the periodic updates to 10-year-old
manuals about mainframe systems. So we stay in the Dark Ages?!
>
> So, can anyone give me advice on how to go about suggesting this company get
modern and incredibly more efficient? Anybody deal with converting over 300
manuals to a modern word processing tool?
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