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?

Sounds to me like you want a CMS. You have content, and it needs to be managed.

Once set up, you can admin them relatively easily and they're designed to be searchable. You can skin them in the corporate colours and put it on the intranet. Joomla! and Drupal spring to mind, but perhaps one like MediaWiki might be more suitable?

If you download it as a Virtual Appliance then there's very little setup involved, and you can get down to creating pages in no time.

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/839


It's not for you, it's for them

And there ends my very inadequate reply to a wonderfully worded question

I've just streamed through the first bulk of the mediawiki wiki and it sounds like you're right - it certainly does seem to be the best way forward. The possibilities* seem quite far-reaching, and I imagine I would get special severance from my other duties if I were to develop it to also act as a repository for office documents other than my BIM-related ones.

The code looks a little daunting coming from albeit limited beginnings in html, but I'm sure there's a WYSIWYG out there (I didn't look at the other link - I'm a little brain weary after the first one!) - but at least we've the PHP & MySQL already to go on our server. Although that's all set to change soon... it might be best I focus on the content in my boggo word document for now, then at least I could do find/replace on hotlink words to insert the code near-automatically, pre-copy and paste into the mediawiki editor. Hmmmm.


*I wonder, do you think with the right type of hyperlink, you could launch an external, local-network-located file, such as a word minutes template, from the wiki? Like an office-portal/frontend? Or am I missing the point? Or asking the obvious?

Wiki sounds like the best bet.

If it were me I'd probably revel in the intricacies of LaTeX and format it more as one long report/article/essay, enjoying a more academic style of writing along the way. Then I'd have something I had enjoyed doing, something I was proud of, and something sufficient enough to say "I've done it" and sufficiently boring for no one to read it thus keeping my job safe :p

But yeah, otherwise a wiki...

Believe you me Ben, I will enjoy writing it! My 8 hour sesh today flew by - I've barely scratched the service and this is easily going to by one of those projects I enjoy doing, I always knew I would, I just never saw the need nor had been granted the leniency of time to do it as my role proper.

And the best thing? Going by the expression of bewilderment on my colleague's face today, I can tell very few well ever read it.

Sharepoint would do practically everything you want.
Including metatgging & the option of online searching of the word docs.

And effectively no code needed.

We will talk more on next week.

*Which reminds me, I didn't send you our agenda... sorry - crap news this morning has put me in a bit of a daze - I'll send it through first thing Monday.

Does that tie them in to the MS ecosystem though? Can OO.o/LO.o use Sharepoint?

My main problem with Sharepoint is that I've never understood how the licensing works. Reading about it doesn't seem to make it any clearer!

Team services is free. You just need the appropriate CAL's for the server it's sitting on & an SQL license if you're not using the free SQL express database