[TCS Users] OT:Tool and Company Recommendations for Documentation Project

[Art Campbell]

My first take on this, based on the bare bones details you provided:

1. Questionnaire. I would try to do this online using a tool to which
a user can store their responses and go  back and alter them, as well
as attach supporting documents. I'm using MachForm on my web sites and
love it... but I've never tried to do more than a 8-10 pages. You can
specify any of a number of output formats, so you can suck the info
into a database, word or frame doc, a pdf, emails, etc. in addition to
having the source online.

You may also be able to do this with Acrobat, particularly the X
version which has (reportedly) greatly enhanced forms capability, but
I haven't played with that yet.

2.  I'd probably go with Frame and Acrobat with commenting enabled and
some kind of version control mechanism so that once a document is
saved, it's preserved as a snapshot. And the documents integrated in
such a way that you can pull the comments back into the master Frame
document periodically.

Cheers,
Art

Art Campbell
               art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52
Vincent and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
                                                      No disclaimers apply.
                                                               DoD 358



On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Joseph Lorenzini <jaloren at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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