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Subject:Re: Documentation tools for large documents From:Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 22 Mar 2002 07:27:25 -0500
Subash,
I don't know if this is consistent with your workflow (or whether your
workflow can be adapted to take advantage of it), but one common way to
handle this is with Acrobat..
For a while, Adobe sold a product called Acrobat Business Tools (I
believe they've withdrawn it from the market, but you should definitely
check.) It was a $79 per person tool that allowed users to add notes and
comments to PDFs. If it is no longer available, you have to spend a
little more and get everyone a copy of Acrobat.
What you circulate is the PDF. If you don't want to invest in a workflow
management solution, you have to overcome three human factors issues.
First, you have to teach people to use the tool. Second, you have to get
people to behave in a disciplined way with regard to workflow (but
apparently they do that now, so it shouldn't be a problem), and you have
to get them to write their comments in a particular way. Specifically,
when someone pastes a sticky note on a PDF, they have to remember to
write "Page 79, paragraph 3," or the equivalent, at the beginning of
every comment. (The reason is that you can then generate a summary text
file with everyone's comments, rather than opening the PDF and paging
through it to examine everyone's comments one by one. Without the page
annotations, the comments are hard to decipher.)
The author then works through all the comments after the document has
been circulated.
This is MUCH safer than using revision tracking in Word, given the ease
with which a Word document can be corrupted as it makes its way around
your organization. It has the disadvantage, though, that changes have to
be made manually rather than by clicking the Accept button.
HTH,
Dick
Subash Babu wrote:
Hi All,
Our team has been using MS Word for our project documentation. We
write Requirements & Functional Specifications for each version of
the product.Due to version control and the co-existence of multiple
versions, the document size has increased so much that shipping them via
mail is now a painful job and we have had to use file splitters. Our
documents have use-case diagrams, screenshots, tables and call-outs.
We use the 'track changes' and 'add comments' features to record
review comments and incorporate them. Merging of such documents is
also a probable requirement.
Can anyone suggest any other documentation tool which can be used to
perform all the aforesaid functions without increasing the document
size substantially?
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