Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Harding, Dan]

Good morning,

We have used the same authoring process for eons: Authors/editors work in MS Word, as well as preliminary indexing work. I then take the MS Word file, import into FM (unstructured) and do the final print-ready formatting, making things adhere to our publishing standards and tightening up consistency.

As a process it work well... until it's time to revise the book for the next edition.

Our authors and editors will ONLY work in MS Word. PDF comments/revisions will not work, as there frequently are extensive revisions including insertion of new sections (multiple pages) of content, as well as shuffling of content.

When I export the final FM version back to MS Word for them to work on, the conversion is VERY crude and frequently requires extensive work on the post-conversion Word files for the editors to be able to work within the files.

Then of course there's the reformatting from scratch in FM when the revisions are done (which actually is faster and more reliable than trying to reconcile changes in the MS Word version with the existing FM version).

Is there a better way to perform the round-trip process given the MS Word requirement, and barring that, are there better ways/tools to get cleaner MS Word files from FM than exporting to RTF?

Would making the change from unstructured to structured FM on my part help in this regard?

Environment:

Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise
Framemaker 10 (unstructured) [NOTE: TCS 5 is on order but I have not received it yet.]
Microsoft Office 2010

Thank you in advance.

Dan Harding
University of Illinois Tax School