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I suspect that if there is a canned solution the Doculabs/Arbortext
coalition would be the closest to providing it, and may be looked at down
the road.
As far as dynamic documentation, in one particular instance, and without
getting too particular about my clients actual documentation content, I want
to maintain a table.
Column 1 is a list of applications (by acronym) that are running (monitored
by Tivoli Endpoints)
Column 2 is a list of application descriptions
Column 3 is a list of methods
Column 4 is a list of event handlers
So, for each row we know the apps acronym, description, methods and types of
event handling.
At this point this is an Excel spreadsheet.
Different engineers access it periodically and update their part of it: one
may add an application to the list of apps, another may add or remove an
event handler for an app.
Current practice calls for the engineer who adds/changes/deletes apps or
events then to update the table.
They hired me because the engineer is buried in engineering and rarely
fulfills his documentation responsibility. They wanted me to be the
documentation police, so the engineer could shoot me an email saying he
added an app with x monitors and I would go update the table.
I don't see that as a viable solution.
I want this document to be dynamic - to read the appropriate data sources so
that when an app is added/removed the document is updated.
I want the list of apps and list of monitors to be databased. The engineer
can access data in Oracle much faster than he can find the doc, update it
and go through version control to post it back to the document management
system. All the engineer has to do is update the database re apps running,
or events monitored, and the document will update itself.
I then want to publish that table on the intranet as a ready reference so
that any engineer can see what's running at any time.
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