Re: Collaborative authoring, production, and CMS?

[Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com>]

Go with the wiki.  Modern enterprise wikis have pretty much everything  
you're looking for and they're easy to get up and running with quickly  
for everyone involved.  With a wiki the structure is more flexible so  
you're going to end up being the overall structure editor and topic  
organizer, but that would probably be true of the project no matter  
what software you used.

Laura


On Feb 24, 2010, at 12:02 PM, Mike Stockman wrote:

> In my latest gig, I'm going to be creating several large technical  
> documents
> where some developers (3 or 4 people) will be active participants in  
> the
> documents as well... I own them, but they'll help with structure,  
> they'll
> write some material, review my content, etc. I'm happy with that, but
> passing a Word document around the department sounds like my idea of  
> hell,
> so I'm in the market for a new tool/workflow.
>
> Here are my criteria:
>
> 1) It should be object-oriented (topic-driven), so multiple people  
> can be in
> different sections at the same time without stepping on each other,  
> and to
> make reorganization easier. Database-driven or file-driven? I don't  
> have an
> opinion yet.
>
> 2) A relatively simple authoring interface should be available... the
> developers should be able to jump in and write or edit without  
> learning a
> cryptic new tagging method or a radical new interface.
>
> 3) The publishing method is still being defined... could be PDF,  
> could be
> HTML, maybe something else. The authoring environment needs to be  
> able to
> either spit out multiple formats (as AuthorIT or some wikis do, for  
> example)
> or a standard format (HTML or XML that I can transform to what I  
> eventually
> need).
>
> 4) Revision control of some kind.
>
> Am I missing anything?
>
> So far, my research has led me to:
>
> A) Wikis. MediaWiki (the wiki behind wikipedia), the latest beta of  
> which
> spits out some fine looking PDFs, seems like the best so far. Revision
> control, topic-oriented, etc. But I'm not sure how that would be for
> organizing the information... can you set up collections of topics
> hierarchically?
>
> B) Author-It/Author-It Live, which I have some past experience with.  
> The
> company's hard to get information from, but I'm sure I'll hear back  
> from
> them at some point. Author-It has the advantage of providing a Word- 
> like UI
> and being able to publish to many formats, but they're also pricey  
> and the
> people holding the purse strings at my company may balk. I may have to
> propose it anyway, since it appears to be a decent fit.
>
> C) DITA-based solutions (which seem perfect in structure, topic  
> management,
> etc.). But the DITA editors I know about involve too much manual  
> tagging of
> content, even with Oxygen or Serna, and I don't think I can expect the
> developers to learn that.
>
> So this ended up kind of long, but if anyone has any advice --  
> unlikely on
> this list, but you never know :-) -- I'd appreciate it. If my  
> assumptions
> seem off, please say so, since the joy of being a sole writer is  
> that you
> always agree with yourself no matter how wrong you may be.
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
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Explore CAREER options and paths related to Technical Writing,
learn to create SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS documents, and
get tips on FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION best practices. Free at:
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