Re: Tracking different parts of a document

Unfortunately it's often a lot more then a $64,000 question. ;)

<caveat> I'm working for a company that builds non-form based environements for Word and other platforms to do exactly this kind of thing </caveat>

It's been my experience that when managing document/content operations there are a limited scope of documents that come out of each department.  It's been manageable for me, in the past, to maintain style guides for various sets of documents which, while adding an additional managment task, has generally let me avoid implementing "structured" authoring environments, the expense that accompanies them (and their maintenance), and the training/adoption issues that plague their role-out.

I'm speaking of department sizes of less then 100 or so, and where the organization can use "style" flags that come back after a document's been submitted that flag certain items like an expected heading missing, no client name found etc...

I've done this in Word by adding menus that "submit this file as <type>" and running validation/parsing rules against it.  Author/editors then get feedback within moments.

That's really where I find the trade-off... between a feed-back based system and a system that enforces styles in a strict authroing environment (Arbortext/Documnetum etc...)

I think "world of hurt" is not universal at all, and that a flexible system is ideal in certain instances.

That said, there is also a very strong case for form-based environments, but I would decide on which direction to go in based on the nature of the organizations and the actual content they want to manage rather then on assumptions that using Word (or any other editor) presents too many ways to break the system.

Best,

Michael


> The $64000 question is whether the document is authored as items and
> assembled when changed, or authored as a whole and items split out.

> If it's the latter, than I agree with James Robertson. You're in for a
> world of hurt. If the customer is not amenable to a form based approach,
> then there are too many ways for authors to break the system without
> meaning to.
> 
> Dwight

> > point for this sort of solution, but I confess I haven't recently
> > looked at the tools available to meet this sort of need.
> >
> > Regards, James