Re: XML Doc Review -- WAS: Documentation collaboration - best practices and tools

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

If you're using a CCMS to manage your content, many of them have review
workflows built right in.

If not (and it sounds like you're not), you may want to use Acrobat's
Shared Review feature.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/shared-pdf-document-reviews.html

Whatever you do, you want to avoid isolated reviews as much as possible.
That is, avoid getting individual feedback from everyone involved - it's a
pain to stitch together, it's time-consuming, and it creates more work when
you have to chase down disagreements between reviewers. Centralize it and
allow reviewers to see and respond to each other's comments.

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Chris Despopoulos <
despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:

> I'm branching this off because I think it's a special situation...  When
> documenting in XML, how do you handle doc review?  A few possibilities are:
> * Generate PDF and deliver review copies
> * Generate HTML and post to a "review" site
> * Review the raw XML
> * Other?
>
>
> Where I work the situation is very similar to what Lois describes below,
> only we use DITA.  The docs are part of the product source, and they are
> automatically visible whenever the product gets built.  At first I just
> committed doc changes, and the daily build would get them out for all to
> see as HTML.  Then we switched to a review process using ReviewBoard.
> Since the docs are in the code repository, I must also have a review before
> I can commit -- a major bummer for my work flow.  Now I generate a PDF for
> the subset that needs reviewing, and post that via ReviewBoard -- and
> commit after people say it's ok (which can take a while).
>
>
> One thing I noticed is, nobody wants to review raw XML.  So if your source
> is XML, what is your work flow?


-- 
Bill Swallow

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