OT:Tool and Company Recommendations for Documentation Project

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all:


I have a colleague who is starting a small business. The business has two
specific documentation needs: 1) create a questionnaire and 2) create a
specifications sheet.

The questionnaire is probably a 40 page document with a mixture of open
ended questions and some other more restricted answers (check boxes,
selections etc). Colleague wants to avoid the annoyance one experiences with
a lot of form documents (e.g., word) where a bit too much text throws the
formatting off for the rest of the document etc.

The Specification Sheet is an agreement between the company and the customer
(not a legal document as those are separate). It would contain lots of
details and would ideally have an appendix or something that allows images
etc of customer selections that can be hyperlinked. The specification
document (may apply to questionnaire too but less critical) must be able to
identify changes made after the specification is agreed upon. So if the
customer changes mind about something, my colleauge can mark the
specification document with the time, circumstance and nature of the change
in the specification document.

While he would try to maximize the online access to these documents, both
variety would have to be printed (with change indications).

So given that scenario:

1) What software tools do you believe would be good for this sort of thing?

2) Do you know of any companies that help in authorizing these types of
documents?

3) Any other avenues we should look at?


Here are my answers, but I'd be interested in what others have to say:


1) What software tools do you believe would be good for this sort of thing?

For questionnaire: I'd purchase Acrobat Pro X. This suite of products comes
with a program called Adobe LifeCycle Designer. This program is a
point-and-click graphical form design tool that simplifies the creation of
forms. You can fill a form online, submit the data, and print it, or print
and fill the form by hand. You can design a form, define its logic, and
modify it to match paper counterparts. This program easily allows to create
open ended questions, drop-down menus, check boxes etc.

For specification: I'd tentatively recommend Adobe FrameMaker. Its extremely
stable (you can scale this up to a hundred of pages without risk of
corrupting anything) and makes it very easy to handle layout of images and
text. Its also very easy to hyperlink images. Framemaker also has the
ability to handle track changes and can automatically generate a change bar
for content that has changed. However, marking the change information would
be a manual process, which I don't know if that's acceptable or not. Also,
FrameMaker does have a moderate learning curve so you'd probably have to
spend one or two days getting a feel for the product. Also, the nice thing
thing is you could generate a PDF, enable it for commenting, send it to your
customer, the customer could makes comments in the PDF, and your brother
could import the comments into his FrameMaker document allowing him to make
changes on his own terms.

2) Do you know of any companies that help in authorizing these types of
documents?

I don't have an answer for this one. If anyone knows of any companies please
let me know.


3) Any other avenues we should look at?

I suggested that he just contract this work out so he can avoid the hassle
of documentation


Sincerely,

Joseph Lorenzini
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