[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither! [LONG]

[Henning Follmann]

On Apr 4, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Peter C. Norton wrote:

> I've dealt with craploads of documentation in my time. My ideal is
> something like a good wiki for writing and presenting a document
> (eg. the way something like moinmoin works) and being able to spit out
> a document, with included cruft like default headers, formatting,
> etc. into asciidoc and have it produce pdfs (or docbook, or latex,
> etc. if someone wants to tweak their output further) and I don't have
> to do any more than say, as with a wiki


That comes close to what I would like to see.
Since the discussion goes more and more into format and collaboration  
I will put an (long) example what I want to see:
Assume two companies alpha and beta. Both are chemical manufacturers.
When you deal with chemicals it is good practice to have SOPs in  
place for every chemical your employees might come in contact with.
And of course you also need specification of the chemicals you are  
actually producing.
Back to the SOP:
They should include stuff like
- name of the chemical
- chemical properties
- how to handle the chemical
- and specific operation instruction for processes in your site

These SOPs are created by many different employees in you company and  
they have to be available to even more employees
It is important to mention that creativity is something bad here. You  
want that all SOPs look the same. Employees must find the required  
information fast, and if the documents are always different that  
creates a problem.
So if we use an office product what do we create? An office document  
right. It might have the term SOP in the title but is still an office  
document. And it might have a <Heading1> before a paragraph which has  
the text "Handling" but that is about it.

When we create a xml document workflow we would have an xml document  
associated with a SOP.DTD.
The DTD would spell out what nodes (e.g. Handling) are mandatory and  
in what order they have to appear.
That is actually important information. No office document can  
provide that. Sure you could use templates, but that is what it says  
a template not a real method for validation.
And also that color fetish guy who just does not care that there are  
actual 20% of men who cannot tell the difference between red and  
green, who just wont stop putting those colors into his office  
documents. If you have xml SOPs and a corporate wide stylesheet for  
these documents all will come out the same. And it's also much easier  
to produce documents for online use.

Next alpha and beta merge, currently it's real hip to merge and get a  
new name:
delta appears.
Now all the documents for sales have to be re-branded. Try doing that  
with office documents.
Now with xml sales documents you develop a new stylesheet and your ar  
done.
A small script to create all new printouts and thats it.


That is my biggest problem with odt or openXML. They are just office  
document schemas. And that's all these applications can handle.  
Companies pay big bugs to put back the information into their  
workflow they loose by using office applications.
Companies like EMC, ixos make big bugs by doing that while a regular  
svn should be enough to manage your documents.


-h


-- 
Henning Follmann           | hfollmann at itcfollmann.com
it consultant              | www.itcfollmann.com