| My apologies for that confusion.
I am specifying a project that can best be described as "just in time
documentation". The document architecture will be as follows.
1. A series of MS Access tables will be designed built that hold
hundreds or thousands of variable data elements on a variety of
production systems.
2. A series of document templates (MSWord6.0) will be built
incorporating OLE and DDE links to the Access table data where
appropriate. For example: "The Digital Ramjet Peanut Butter
Spreader support system is hosted on the ABC cluster,
which runs the XYZ operating system." The template for the
Digital nuclear widget would use variables three and four, and so
forth.
3. The documents would then be loaded onto a Web server, where they
could be accessed from anywhere inside the company through a
PC/Workstation browser or from a terminal using lynx.
The advantages of this approach are several:
1. A consistent document template will be used across many
applications,
2. Document maintenance becomes table/database maintenance.
Whenever a variable changes, that change is entered into the
appropriate table, and the DDE/OLE updates the page the next time it
is viewed.
3. By hosting on the Web, a consistent viewing mechanism and markup
language will be employed. In addition, related documents can be
hyperlinked.
The proposed audience for this documentation will be operations
personnel who need to troubleshoot problems. In that sense, this can
be viewed as a quasi help desk, or employee support system.
My questions are simple:
1. Are we crazy to attempt such an ambitious project?
2. Does anyone have any good metrics that we can use to estimate the
time and resources needed to implement this architecture?
3. Is there a similar system up and running or in development, and with
whom can I speak about it?
Thanks in advance for your guidance.
Gary Crosby
[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]
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| I think you're making this more difficult than you need to.
By using Word, you are causing problems for the server, because
Word documents can only be served to PCs, not Workstations or,
certainly, LYNX viewers. If you use Word, the documents will
have to be converted to HTML or text before serving.
So the first question is: are the documents being served dynamically
or will they be processed to a web-ready format on a regular schedule?
If the data is supposed to be served dynamically, you should consider
using CGI scripts that attach to the ACCESS data at runtime. (There
are references in the INTERNET_TOOLS notes conference to CGI templates
accessing ACCESS, if you know what I mean...)
If the data is processed periodically into static web documents
(HTML), I'm still not sure Word is the appropriate mechanism, since
batch processing is not its specialty.
I think Word would be very helpful for prototyping templates
and, thereby, maintaining consistency. You could even use Word to
create template HTML files that are parsed at runtime (similar to
server includes) to attach to the ACCESS data. But the actual
attachment would not be OLE in that case.
--Andrew
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