the process we were tought by our partner regarding reviewing is the following - very inefficient - process:
1. Someone product manager finds some error in the documentation.
2. He needs to call or email the senior editor to send him an fltrev for editing the error or extending the documentation.
3. The senior editor needs to interrupt his work, navigate to the relevant topic, create that als Revision-File and send that via email to the product manager.
4. The product manager needs to wait for this email and check from time to time his account.
5. When the email receives, he makes his changes and sends back to the senior editor.
6. The senior editor has to check his email-account from time to time, whether there are new fltrev-files and - if yes, to import them.
7. ... has to check / accept the changes and "check-in" the final results to the team foundation server.
In my oppinon this process has two big weeknesses:
1. It is impossible to do some legwork without first to interrupt the senior editor (no self-service) and some insane waiting-time.
2. All the stuff is put to the mailsystem wich is of course no file system. So it's the wrong place.
The process we have in mind is the following:
1. Every hour we automatically extract the project structure from our versioning system (MS TFS in our case) and publish all changes to a sharepoint document library. (Already done. It's easy.
)2. Our product managers have change alerts on 'their' folders so that they get automatically informed when some of 'their' topics are changed. (standard in sharepoint-Sites)
3. If they need to extend or edit something, they can just open that chapter, make their changes and save that to the library.
4. The senior editor can easily select (standard windows search feature) the edited files, import them and step through the changes and merge or redact them into the final version. (Hopefully standard in Flare
)5. on check-in of the final version ... See step 1.
The big advantages:
+ that no one needs to interrupt his work only that someone else can continue.
+ that no one needs to wait for someone else,
+ no one needs to spent time for insane steps like manually "generating" a review-zip,
+ files remain on file-systems - mailsystems aint flood with documents.
For us the optimal solution:
? Ist there a way to compare and merge folderstructures and htm-files inside flare without the need of gernerating fltrev? (Like with winmerge, beyond compare etc.)
? Does flare support moving of ressource-files (eg. Screenshots) inside the folder structure and maintain all relative hypelinks automatically?
Second best way:
? Is there a way that flare can auto-generate these fltrev-zip-files when a document is checked-in?
? Or is there at least a way, to bulk generate this fltrev-files for all topics recurse inside a folder-struckture (a flare project)?
Hopefully we don't need to switch from Flare + Contributor to simple html-edits and winmerge / beyond compare or standard MS-Office-Features.
Looking forward for your ideas, how we can have that easier process with flare...
Joachim