Word, Frame, xml authoring and work flow. Opinions? (long)

["David O'Brien" <OBrien_David_P -at- cat -dot- com>]

Hi all.

I find myself on a bit of a merry-go-round here. We originally had a team of 3 
- 4 writers, using Word, to produce doco for a growing mine production 
software suite. Over time the documentation outgrew Word, and I convinced 
management to move to Frame, invest in a bit of training and grow with the 
product.

Well, the economic climate being what it is, etc., a couple of years later I 
now find myself being more or less the only tech writer, the product has more 
than doubled in size and complexity, and management wants tech writing put 
into the hands of the engineers and SMEs, etc., with me acting as an 
editor/content manager.

So far so good. Now for the fun part. The SMEs use Word and mostly aren't 
interested in anything else. The engineers are easier to get along with. I've 
been tasked with putting our Frame docs back into Word. I guess I shot my own 
foot by providing a Word template that some! engineers could use to write 
highly technical docs that could be easily imported into Frame. This is what 
is now being propogated through the group of 20 or so.

Just to add a bit of flavour, we're seriously considering Epic Editor as a 
replacement for both Word and Frame, but it's not going to happen in time to 
stop the shift from Frame to Word. (This is our parent company's standard and 
it makes sense to use it, it just hasn't been stamped yet). This is further 
piqued by Word 2003s supposed XML handling capabilities, which is supposed to 
work well with Epic, share a common schema, etc.

As far as deliverables go, we rely mostly on pdfs. I just printed the latest 
User Manual and it's just shy of 300 pages (double-sided). There are also 
training manuals, reference cards, troubleshooting guides, etc., and these 
are all produced in English and translated into Spanish.

Management want short answers to long questions, balk at introducing "foreign" 
products but not so much at converting all of those Frame docs to Word. A 
quick poll of a few engineers indicates they're not at all put off by writing 
in xml.

Right now I'm open to suggestions and opinions on this particular situation. I 
have a variety of ideas but they generally require a good six months and a 
bit of training to implement. We don't have six months; rather our next 
release needs to be available in six months or less. Now that I'm the only 
tech writer training needs to be timed right. So I need help in getting 
through the "interim" phase without making the final phase a complete 
nightmare.

Sorry for being so long-winded.
cheers
David

-- 
David O'Brien
Sr. Technical Writer
Caterpillar MineStar Solutions

617 3329 8122
davido -at- cat -dot- com
--
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.


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