Structured FM, DITA, and DOCX

[Rene Stephenson]

Hi All,

I have a new work situation that's pretty mixed. Very active product lines, selling millions of each product annually, tight deadlines with a solid customer base. They have distributed writing efforts where a lot of engineers do the writing and therefore Word is strongly entrenched. But, the marketing side is all for the FM/PDF workflow, especially since their user doc is either online (via RH) or printed materials (PDF preferred by their print company). So, the marketing writer and I have been using Adobe TCS (RH, unstructured FM, PDF review cycles) to meet the needs. However, the challenge that I now have is finding a way to create system-level documentation that can use the Word 2007/2010 DOCX files as a source so that Engineering can keep it dynamic, fluid, and accurate, without going through some crazy conversion process to get it into FM.

I read the article at Adobe recently about how incrementally moving into a DITA workflow via using Structured FM is the only practical way to mix structured and unstructured files. Made sense to me. Someone else had mentioned that DOCX can be manipulated via XLST and DITA... so it seems maybe there's a way to get things going...??  Is there a plug-in for FM or some program that works with FM, or do I already have a solution in the TCS arsenal that I just don't know about yet?

Any direction that you could give me would really be appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Rene Stephenson
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