Re: Distributed authoring using Word and Domino?

[Robert_Johnson -at- percussion -dot- com]

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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