In my job I am confronted by processes that I know, with a bit of effort, could be done a whole lot better. More often than not, I am sadly at a loss as to how best to go about making these improvements - mostly because of my limited technological know-how. It's the same old story of having a good idea, but not knowing what to do with it.

My current "project" is to author what could essentially be called "a team agreement document" - which has traditionally been a long winded word document, printed to .pdf, distributed, reviewed, completed and/or commented on, returned, vetted, revised digitally, re-distributed, reviewed again, and (hopefully) completed and signed by all - only then for this "final" version to be re-digitised and "published" as a given. At least until something demands a change or addition and then the process is repeated.

Apart from the obvious back-and-forth time-wasting of the process, there are two main issues I wish to address with this process.

First; the "content" of this particular type of document is currently being banded around, copied, pasted and re-purposed by all and sundry by certain faction of the architectural community. It's a commonly known, and sadly accepted, fact. Clearly I'd prefer that not to happen with my (original) content.

Second; even with a fully locked down .pdf - with all the intelligent formatting in the world (i.e dropdown selection fields, checkboxes etc, which is beyond me anyway) - the document still has to get passed around, and the results collated. Clearly that's not very "clever".


So...

What would be my best route? I have a feeling something web-based would be ideal - but that's a bit vague. We have Sharepoint at work, (not that I've explored it much) and I know Infopath's all about creating Forms (again, not much time spent with it) - so those two seem to be my best "immediate" answer.... it would be awesome to have something that pulls in / links to external data from elsewhere on Sharepoint (project team information, supporting documents, etc) but I think for a first pass I could live without that and simply go with a multiple-user, intelligently editable (locked from copy/paste) document.

Or is a MS solution not the way to go? Would I be better off bothering one of my web-guru friends to build me something from scratch?



I know I'm making work for myself . I know I should just "let it go" but since my (unsupported & lonesome) role is pretty much 75% R&D - this kind of thing is my work - and this long, boring post is a start to that research I guess. So any advice, pointers would be greatly appreciated.