An odd, vague thread title - for perhaps an odd, vague thread enquiry.
Firstly, a bit of background...
As some of you may recall; I'm "in" architecture.
But long gone are the days of me being an all out drafting machine laughing at documentation deadlines whilst thoroughly emmersed in designing & detailing.
Alas, these days I'm more of your middle-management kinda-guy, who trains his peers to do as he does, and (on occasion) is expected to write all his years of knowledge acquisition (and retention) into "guidance" for others.
Just in case the worst should happen.
For a long while I've resisted doing this (the writing part) for a number of reasons but mostly because; a. it's a Herculean task, and b. it (in my eyes) is pretty redundant because I managed without.
But (unsurprisingly) it turns out not everyone shares the same enthusiasm, (or capacity) for self-improvement - and the time has come for me to rein in the disparate activities of my peers and write some "FORMAL" company guidance.
So...
What I want (read "have") to do is write something; or more specifically, format something that has an intelligent means of navigation.
I can't work out if I want it "all in" (as in everything content wise is one source file) or a set of seperate standalone "source" documents that could be individually revised/updated/collated/referenced.
To give you an idea of the size of the exercise; off the top of my head, today's first draft got me upto 10 main section "branches", each with a minimum of 5 sub-section "branches" - approximately half of which will necessitate a subsequent additional "reference document" to accompany maybe 5 other over-arching core "reference documents" (like the glossary, etc) - so in the order of 80+ "sections" of text. Some will be as short as a 50-word paragraph but others will push way past 1000+ word "howto" guides.
I'd like intelligent content "mapping" - so I don't have to chase dead hyperlinks all over the shop - but that points to one single document for find/replace exercises (when "current info" needs updating) - but the output couldn't be live - it'd need to be static - and I'd rather it not be a massive, clunky, bookmark/tagged .pdf (not sure why, happy to be convinced otherwise)
Although I think it'd be quite neat, I don't think a CSS-formatted set of HTML documents would be particularly user-friendly (should I ever leave) - that said - to have it as an browser-viewable/navigatable document most certainly appeals. A mini-local website perhaps? Hmm.
It's been suggested we go the wiki route (for other aspects of company info aswell) - but we've not got round to implementing one yet - and I imagine we won't for some time - but since I'm actually not fond of wiki-content presentation I'm not that fussed (I'm still a little old school and like my expandable/collapsable folder "trees")So...
After all this dithering. Any suggestions?
