Re: Electronic Passing

[Jane Bergen <janeb -at- AIRMAIL -dot- NET>]

On 23 Aug 96 at 0:51, Laura wrote:

> I wonder if anyone can tell me if there is an industry standard
> about whether or not to allow SMEs access to the electronic copies
> of in-progress documents?


I hope you get some good feedback on this topic as I'm struggling
with this same topic right now. A lot of the information for my
technical reference guide is very, very technical and requires the
SME to write something, then I take it and organize it and "clean it
up." Our engineers say they're willing to do it and to make
revisions, but only if they can do it directly into the document (but
are willing to work with a doc copy, thank Goodness). In other words,
they refuse to deal with a pen and paper.

So how do you track revisions for leaving a "trail" and how do you
manage the problems of revised files. My boss took my document once
and went nuts with cutting-pasting, but he lost some of the document
in the process and we didn't discover it for some time. It's just a
big mess. I would prefer they would mark on my hard copy and let me
make the revisions, but from the top on down, they refuse. So far,
I've been passing off copies of my doc file, letting them revise,
then I print out their copy and make the same revisions (sometimes
using copy-paste if it's straightforward enough) to my original
working file. Seems very inefficient to me.

Jane Bergen
Jane Bergen, Technical Writer
janeb -at- airmail -dot- net or  janeb -at- answersoft -dot- com

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