Summary of Responses: Document Back Covers

[Jon Herrera <jonherrera -at- YAHOO -dot- COM>]

Thanks to Yves Jeaurond, Marc Lederman, Ananda Banttari, and Terry
Dickerson for their responses. Here is my original question and their
suggestions:

My Question:
> My manager wants me to take over maintaining the text for the back
> cover of our technical documents. This is basically a one-pager with a
> listing of our sales offices, a short description of the company, a
> list of our registered trademarks, and a standard disclaimer. So far I
> know that the Sales and Legal departments are involved in this.
>
> Has anyone maintained this kind of thing for their technical
> documents? How much time and effort does it take? I would appreciate
> any suggestions and advice.


Yves Jeaurond:

This sounds like a job for....

The Chicago Manual of Style. You will find descriptions of front and
back matter. Usually name, address, phone, fax, W3 site & email is
enough.
-----------------------

Marc Lederman:

We created a "last page" template (using FrameMaker but could be done in
Word) for our back covers (in fact, we did it for all of our page types)
and updated it as needed, which wasn't very often.  It didn't require a
lot of maintenance for our business phone numbers, locations, field
service, and customer service numbers.  Even if your last page changes
fairly often, it can be a real time saver to make a master (template)
page and call that into your document, making changes in only one place
for many documents rather than making changes every time you
create/change a doc.

In the long run this saved a tremendous amount of time and worked quite
well.
-----------------------

Ananda Banttari:

This is something that can be either easy or a real pain,
depending on your company. My suggestions:

1. Find out exactly who in Sales and Legal are responsible
for up-to-date information. Ask them to add you to their
contact list for change-of-information notices.

2. Whenever you print the cover, make sure you get
"sign-off" of a proof from the Sales and Legal people.
Go to them with a proof (not a copy of the proof, but the
real thing), and a sign-off list that you have created. The
sign-off list should include each Sales and Legal person
involved, you, your manager, and possibly others (like
Marketing, perhaps, for the "short description of the
company). Each signator should date their sign-off.
Let them all know that any one person can veto the
proof with sufficient cause.

My reasons:
1. You have a better chance of preventing problems.
2. There might be someone in Sales or Legal who
feels like some of their power or control is being
threatened. Giving them veto power reassures them.
3. If anything does go wrong, you pull out your sign-
off sheet. "All of these people reviewed it, and they
didn't see anything wrong, either."

Our corporate HQ just moved; my observations are
based on dealing with move-related issues, which include
most of the ones Jon was talking about. (If anyone
reading this is faced with a corp. HQ move, email me
off-list and I'll tell you my war stories ;-] and how to prevent
annoying -- and sometimes costly! -- issues.)
-----------------------

Terry Dickerson:

        I have found that the easiest thing to do is to make a template
of the page in question.  Then all you have to do is plug it into
whatever document you're creating.  I do this with standard stuff like
safety warnings, statements of warranty, things like that where the text
doesn't change very often.  Then I simply drag and drop (or cut and
paste) the page into the manual I'm writing.  It's also easier to get
boilerplate wording from Sales and Legal before you start, then tell
them to keep their fingers out of the pie until you're done.


Thanks again!


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