Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Laura,

I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
take a look at these:

http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/

The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.

 It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
If all your manager wants to do is "make it easier to share our doc set
with people in the company", then instead of saying "XML authoring to the
rescue" I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).

>From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
authoring will probably be hard.

Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your "share content
with others" situation:

   - who in the company do you need to share the content with?
   - If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then why
   not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository and
   have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
   - If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
   content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
   enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
   - If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company, then
   why not look at using a wiki?

Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
current workflow.

Any other questions, just let me know.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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