Possible uses

[heidelberger75]

Hi all,

I am investigating what tools would be best to use for management and creation of Technical Data Sheets. We have a requirement to be able to create multiple documents using a template that consists of our logo, header, footers, etc. And in the future, if anything in this template changes, we want to propogate the change across all existing documents.

We also want the ability to approve changes both to individual data sheets and the template.

Could OpenKM fulfill these requirements or do you know of some other tool we can investigate?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help!
Geoff

[jllort]

We have done something similar with docx documents and a table at the begining which contents are modifyed programatically. Althought it goes right, users who edit files must take care to do not chaging this section, obviously is not the perfect scenario. Basically the idea is having some marks into the document and use them later for making changes ( the problem is that users on edition can destroy this marks ). As I said, goes right, must here you have human interaction, and you know what happens with human, yes ... mistake is always on next corner.

If you really want doing it correctly, should consider working in another paradigm, structured documents. You should thinking on separate information ( should study your case, but if you are talking about basic sheets without images, could consider store information in separate database -> minimal application for editing this files ), the idea if having the document structure well separated and use a generator behing for building sheets based on data into each piece of the structure.

I will share with you some information about structured documents ( probably you do not need exactly it, but will give to you some ideas about what I'm talking about )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Inf ... chitecture
http://www.dita-ot.org/
http://www.fontoxml.com/solutions/fontoxml-editor/ ( here for example an editor )

Hope it help you on the zen of it.