Document management tools or processes

[Melissa Lowery <melissa -dot- lowery -at- CAPITALONE -dot- COM>]

     TECHWR-Lers:

     I need recommendations for document management tools or processes.
     Here is the situation I am in:

     Three months ago I started a new job where my primary assignment has
     been to help our Analysis and Design team revamp their documentation
     process. This team does initial planning and design work for other
     teams that create servers for internal deployment. The A&D team is
     often working on various planning stages for three different server
     releases at once. They create the same types of documents for each
     release. Their documents consist of about 5-7 different types of
     information that is often cut and pasted from very large "master"
     documents and then cut and pasted back into the large documents once
     the servers are actually developed. They had been maintaining all of
     their information (business classes, API reference material,
     structures, etc.) as very large Word documents (213, 240, and 150 pp.
     respectively).

     My first move was to break these huge documents up into their
     component pieces (they were complaining that it was hard to scroll
     through the big documents--I can't imagine why, since we all know how
     well Word handles long documents ;-0). I am using MasterView to
     recreate the long documents when it is necessary to "publish" a
     document for internal reference. I need to be able to maintain
     multiple versions for each chunk since I will need to "publish" a
     document version for each server version, even though the same
     document piece may be changed in each of the three releases currently
     in development.

     I need to find a tool or process to help me store and track revisions
     for these component pieces. One of the A&D team members is really
     pushing hard for me to use PVCS to manage this task. I have read on
     this list before that this is not a very good tool for documents
     because it was really designed for source code, not binary files. My
     PVCS administrator here is very much against using it because of the
     file sizes involved and the limited disk space that has been assigned
     for PVCS on our server. Does anyone have any specific experience using
     PVCS or some other more appropriate tool to track multiple revisions
     of document components. Unfortunately, price and ease of installation
     are two factors I have to consider since I do not have unlimited
     resources to do this (i.e. suggesting a tool that costs $10,000 or
     requires a specialist to implement is of no use to me). Any
     suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated. I will be glad to
     summarize all responses to the list. Thanks!

     Melissa Lowery
     Technical Writer, Capital One
     melissa -dot- lowery -at- capitalone -dot- com

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=