RE: [GD-Design] Design Documents

[Albert R. <al...@de...>]

We use Word for our non-technical design documentation and have yet to
really run into problems. However, for the most part only one person
ever edits a given section of the design document at a time. Everyone
contributes ideas, and someone who's a good writer sticks them into the
doc. We have it broken into several sections and then exported into
HTML. The doc right now is about 70 pages. To keep people up-to-date we
just paste changes onto the homepage of our internal web server for all
to read.

The reason we went with this solution was simplicity. If you don't need
to have multiple people editing the same section of the document at the
same time, then you won't run into any problems. Saving as HTML and
putting it onto a web server works great for us, since it's super-easy
for programmers to look up the information they need just by browsing
around on our internal server. There's no setup time, and file->save
as... Is about as easy as it gets.

We use a company style-sheet which is applied to each document so the
webpages come out looking pretty. Printing from Word's HTML editor has
worked fine for us. Again, this solution hasn't been the most elegant,
and probably wouldn't work for a large team of designers, but overall,
it's served us very well and wasted no valuable time in setup.

For technical documentation we just have a big pile of Word docs in a
folder on the web-server and compliment that with a Java-Doc type
program. Messy, but it works.

-Al