Multiple Scattered Authors

I am developing WebHelp on a contract for a company. Some of the content is being supplied by various non-tech writer people scattered around the country, via Word documents. I incorporate the content into RoboHelp. This seems to be working fine and efficinetly, however now that the RH project has been set up and settled in, they want all of the contributors to start authoring directly in RoboHelp (which none of them has ever used).

I believe that after the first wave of collaboration through the next 2 software releases, the project will end up in the hands of one person who maintains the content. Some of the contributors will not even be on the team anymore.

With all of the nightmares I have been reading and hearing about regarding RH with source control and accessing a project over a network (wirelessly no less), I am concerned that whatever benefits are gained from having each content provider work in RH does not outweigh the pain and expense in work hours that will be involved, from an intial setup perspective, IT troubleshooting (through outsourced IT), and the RH learning curve for writers.

I keep reading warnings about not running a RH project on a network. Is that the same as each writer having a copy of the project on their desktop and using RSC to check files in and out ?

To anyone who has gone through it, was there a lot of back-and-forth with IT to get it set up ? Was it worth it ? Did you bail and what did you do instead ?

Bottom line, I want to recommend that this company continues down the path we are on (one person maintaing the RH content) and not open a can of worms with multiple authors and RSC. Can anyone convince that is good advice, or not ?

Thanks

Johnny in Sarasota