Re: Documentation collaboration - best practices and tools used?

[Shawn <shawn -at- cohodata -dot- com>]

Good morning Stuart,

>PDF: Acrobat/Adobe Reader is very capable as a review tool as long as
reviewers are not trying to make large-scale additions.

My testing of its Shared Review via webDAV server was somewhat successful.
I think I will be able to leverage this tool, as part of my documentation
workflow. The only perplexing piece is that the PDF, to review, doesn't
seem to embed the webDAV authentication. This means that each reviewer
needs to know the user name and password to the webDAV server. That seems
rather odd and not very smart security management.

>Confluence is worth a second look. We don't use it for external documents,
but the templates and macros to support

At this time, I do not see any value in paying for this product when we
already have Google Apps as a central part of our business. On the other
hand, jira is core to our business... so I will allow the adoption of
Confluence to become more of a engineering decision.

Thanks for your input. :)

Shawn

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 6:53 PM, Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>
wrote:

> Hi Shawn.
>
> PDF: Acrobat/Adobe Reader is very capable as a review tool as long as
> reviewers are not trying to make large-scale additions. A two-minute
> demo or half-page cheat sheet will tell reviewers how to use the
> insert, delete, replace, highlight and note tools. Changes or
> additions larger than a paragraph or two could be drafted in a
> separate Google Doc with a comment showing the URL.
>
> Confluence is worth a second look. We don't use it for external
> documents, but the templates and macros to support developing and
> publishing tech docs do seem to have matured a lot in the last couple
> of years. I don't really like the WYSIWYG editor but it's comparable
> to Google Docs, so if an author can handle drafting material in one
> they should be able to handle the other.
>
> --- Stuart
>
>

-- 
*Shawn Connelly*
Technical writer

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