when last we saw our hero (Thursday, Jun 06, 2002), Joel Schneider was madly tapping out: > On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 07:58:48PM -0500, steve ulrich wrote: > > all of the documents are placed into a reposity which uses an oracle > > back end for handling the meta data associated with a given document > > as well as providing really nice ACLs for controlling who can get > > access to the document and such. it's really slick. > > Sounds great. > > > Questions for you: > > 1. Which versions of Word does your system support? (e.g. Word XP, Word > 2000, Word 97, Word 7, Word 6, Word for Windows 2.0, Word 5.5, ...) as a document repository it's not required to support the different versions of word. hell there are powerpoint documents and verilog source in there. it archives all sorts of documents. what is required is the ability to let the indexer process these documents appropriately. from what i've seen verity, google, inktomi and others have licensed the appropriate technology to get at the guts of these documents and make this usable. > > 2. What document processing program would you recommend for me if I > absolutely need to be able to easily access all of the documents 10 or > 15 years from now? what makes you think that these documents will stay in this format for the next 10-15 years? with the ability to batch convert documents as standards and software evolve this becomes a moot point. microsoft provides fairly decent tools for batch upgrading documents from one revision to another and word processors have the ability to use previous versions of a document. repositories are near living things they continue to evolve and adapt to the needs of the business. > 3. Why not store the documents in rich text format instead of using > Word's proprietary .doc format? If my understanding is correct, at > least RTF is a published (non-secret) file format. when you start to publish in rtf you lose all of the hooks that you need for a structured document. you're going to have most of the basic formatting handled but you're going to lose the version tracking, the auto-(toc|index|glossary) generation capability you're not going to be able to handle embedded objects correctly. you've just taken a considerable step backwards. there are very valid business reasons for wanting to have all of that preserved. quite simply - failure to preserve these items does not enhance productivity. > > 4. What program would you recommend for me if my work is going to be > published (professionally) as a book? Are books that were formatted > using MS Word being published these days? > if you're going to be publishing a book your needs are going to be considerably different. you're going to need tools which are capable of doing much more fine grained layout than word can provide. when i've provided documentation for books to be published i've simply submitted my work in word, text, rtf and let the pagemaker/quark heads have at it. publishers have much more demanding requirements than can be addressed by tools such as word, and dare i say TeX/LyX. finally, i believe the problem at hand is the publication / generation of "professional quality documents" which does not necessarily equate to the publication of a book. -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC