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Subject:Re: Intranet vs. Word From:Barry Campbell <barry -at- WEBVERANDA -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 19 Feb 1998 12:26:46 -0500
At 11:18 AM 2/19/98 -0500, Tabatha Helm wrote:
>I'm in the process of placing documents on our company intranet using
>FrontPage 97. Many employees like the documents in Word because
>they are easily accessible and they are comfortable using Word. My
>problem is that I must use FrontPage 97 for our intranet documents.
>Once I convert these documents from Word to FrontPage, I do not want
>to have to keep two documents up-to-date. Is there anyway to please
>everyone?
Tabatha:
Here's what we do.
We have a substantial number of documents on our intranet that were
originally written in Microsoft Word.
Each department and project team has its own "sandbox" on the intranet--
an area where authors can place internal documents in various stages of
development for other folks within the company to review. Key personnel
in each department have been through internal training on FrontPage
and are responsible for maintaining their departmental sites,
with hand-holding and tech support available as needed from Technical
Communications.
We give our technical staff the option of generating PDF files from
the Word source document (this is easiest, and works fine if your
intranet has a search engine that is PDF-aware) *or* using the
Word HTML export filter. To make the HTML export option as painless
as possible, we've distributed a Word stylesheet that maps pretty
cleanly to HTML tags. (The default stylesheet shipped with Word97
is actually quite close to what most people would need; due to
some stylistic idiosyncrasies in our docs, we've had to tweak it
a little.)
This allows doc source to be maintained in Word by the original authors;
whenever an update is needed for the intranet, a PDF or HTML "snapshot"
of the document is reasonably easy to automagically generate; the
department or project-team webhead then migrates the "web-ly" version of
the document to the intranet with FrontPage.
With apologies to Dr. Bronner: Distribute! Delegate! OK!
Hope this helps.
--
Barry Campbell | Senior Technical Writer
barry -at- webveranda -dot- com | Summit Systems, Inc.
(personal/list mail) | 20 Exchange Place, NY, NY
barry_campbell -at- summithq -dot- com | 212.269.6990
(business e-mail)
