TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
For requirements gathering, a Web forms solution on your Intranet may
be better still. The results could easily be collected in a no-cost
database (PostgreSQL, perhaps) for later analysis.
Going automatically to a Microsoft solution would not, to me, seem to
be the way to go when you have "no budget."
If you're got someone with some scripting experience around, you could
have that person put together such a requirements input form using
Python very, very quickly...and there are a plethora of database
bindings for Python.
Of course, using Python (free) and PostgreSQL (also free) would be
very budget-friendly.
Perhaps what you're after is more complex than I am imagining?
On the other hand, a CMS properly established keeps such issues as
versioning to be a no-brainer.
There are many other quite creative optionis. For istance, you might
institute a wiki and make it available to the analysts. That way,
everyone could contribute and avoid needless duplication. I posted a
link some days ago for DokuWiki, which seems designed for this kind of
situation...
David
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 08:12:42 -0500, Stevenson, Rebecca
<Rebecca -dot- Stevenson -at- workscape -dot- com> wrote:
>
>
> David,
>
> Thank you for the suggestions and resources - I didn't realize there
> were so many CMS options out there. This is not actually a document
> storage/retrieval project, however (at least I don't think so); I'm
> building a requirements-gathering tool for our business analysts. Maybe
> I'm not thinking about CMS the right way, but I think our problem lies
> in a different space.
WEBWORKS FINALDRAFT - EDIT AND REVIEW, REDEFINED
Accelerate the document lifecycle with full online discussions and unique feedback-management capabilities. Unlimited, efficient reviews for Word
and FrameMaker authors. Live, online demo: http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l
Technical Communication Certificate online - Malaspina-University College, Canada. Online training in technical writing, software (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Dreamweaver, Acrobat), document & web design, writing manuals, job search. www.pr.mala.bc.ca/tech_comm.htm for details.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archiver -at- techwr-l -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Send administrative questions to lisa -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
