My team consists of two technical writers (and will grow to three soon). We use a shared drive, but cannot have the same FrameMaker document open at the same time, so our current process is:Create 30 or so blank Word documents (one for each new piece of functionality).Divide the Word documents among ourselves.Write the new content in the Word documents.When all the Word documents are complete, one writer copy-pastes the content into the FrameMaker document, applies the paragraph and character tags, and imports screenshots.I was wondering if other technical writing teams have a more efficient co-authoring process and would be willing to share? Ideally, the process would not involve a second application (Word), or as much pressure on a single writer in step #4.Thank you in advance for your help!

Participating Frequently

Question

Recommendations for team co-authoring process

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
May 3, 2016
2 replies
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My team consists of two technical writers (and will grow to three soon). We use a shared drive, but cannot have the same FrameMaker document open at the same time, so our current process is:

Create 30 or so blank Word documents (one for each new piece of functionality).
Divide the Word documents among ourselves.
Write the new content in the Word documents.
When all the Word documents are complete, one writer copy-pastes the content into the FrameMaker document, applies the paragraph and character tags, and imports screenshots.

I was wondering if other technical writing teams have a more efficient co-authoring process and would be willing to share? Ideally, the process would not involve a second application (Word), or as much pressure on a single writer in step #4.

Thank you in advance for your help!

This topic has been closed for replies.

D

drbotkin

Participating Frequently

Let me continue this interesting discussion

I have two Technical Writers in the team. We use unstructured FM 2015 documents (no Word). We would like to work on several chapters (separate files) within a book simultaneously. We use SVN to synchronise our work.
When it comes to chapters - everying goes well. However, every time we update a book, the collision appears.

Will anybody assist please?

Thank you in advance

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

You just need to coordinate with the other writer that you've got the content checked out & that you will do the update; when it's done, check it all in again and continue working.

TomSchenck

Inspiring

I'm also adding writers to the team through acquisitions. We also work in unstructured Frame and are now sharing a few "common" files. We are now spread out around the world.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a file management/control system?

Eventually we would like to all work together on a single book at the same time.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Sounds workable, but a little bit redundant IMHO.

Why not structure your FM docs so that each author just works on the topic that they’ve currently got open. Then the major work would just be when you’re ready to produce some output – make sure all topics are “checked in” and freed up and then build or update the books to which they belong. The only issues I’ve run into is when you need to make a cross-reference to another FM doc that someone else has open. We just coordinated that amongst ourselves to temporarily stop work, release the lock & let the other person open it up for xref-ing.

jeanettew83275945Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks for your reply. I suppose I wasn't clear in the original description, but we are working on a single FrameMaker document, not a book. We hadn't discussed converting the document into a book because, when complete, the output is only 30-50 pages. Would you recommend using a book rather than a single document?

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Wow – if you’ve got two (soon to be three) authors working on only 30-50 pages of content, I would suspect that it’s fairly heavy technical stuff! That seems to reinforce my point of busting it up into separate chunks so that simultaneous parallel authoring can be done and only reconstituting it into one block when it’s time to generate output.

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