On 12/9/05, EP <srcfoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been looking for a good way to handle our company's documentation.
> I've looked at and used mediawiki, plone, and mambo/joomla but nothing seems
> to do what I think it needs to do.
>
>  This is what I need:
>  1. We sell our own software so we need to be able to publish user manuals.
>  2. We need to document our own company procedures, policies, etc.
>  3. We need revision control so if someone wipes out a document we know what
> we need to fix.
>  4. We need version control so we know what version of our document our
> clients or employees are using (Pointing everyone at the web may mitigate
> this need).
>  5. We need access control.  Obviously everyone should not have access to
> everything.
>  6. Easy enough to create/edit/delete/view a document so that our
> non-technical users and employees can handle it.
>
>  These are additional features that should be available:
>  1. Use Word or OpenOffice and import the documents into the document tool
>  2. Should be able to get a PDF version of the same document on the fly
> (i.e. I don't want to store two copies of each document)
>  3. Client access portal so we know who's accessing our documents
>
>  This seems reasonable to me so maybe I'm looking in the wrong places or
> maybe I'm too picky.

Where I'm working, we're using a combination of DocBook [1] and
Subversion[2] (for version control).  It's a bit of a complicated
initial setup but for a larger project with multiple folks
creating/editing documentation, I think it's the best route to go.  We
use XMLmind[3] as an editor (Windows and UNIX versions available) to
create the DocBook source.  XMLmind really makes creating the XML
source easy.  The nice part about having a document as docbook source
is that you can generate whatever format you need (txt, html, pdf,
etc...)

[1] http://www.docbook.org/
[2] http://subversion.tigris.org/
[3] http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

scot