[Sigia-l] Managing product design documentation

[stephanie hornung]

i don't know how much money you have to work with, but interwoven has a 
product made exactly for this problem.

http://www.interwoven.com/products/worksite_mp/

you can set up shared collaboration areas, manage documents, emails, 
tasks, issues, etc.  document check in/check out, versioning, history, 
etc.  its pretty cool.  very expensive, but useful.

good luck!

On Jun 15, 2005, at 7:33 AM, Reinoud Bosman wrote:

> Hey Aida,
>
> First of all organise your documents. Put all the wireframes of one 
> project
> into one visio file using tabs. Put them in a project folder structure.
>
> Make sure only team members that are on the project have access to the
> files. Make sure that all team members on the project have access to 
> the
> files and know where to look for them.
>
> I (mis)used source control software for this before (Rational - 
> exxxpensive,
> CVS - open source) and it works really well, especially because it
> automatically takes care of versioning so you don't end up with 30 
> wireframe
> files in one directory. You know.. wireframes_v1.1, wireframes_v1.2 
> etc etc.
> It will also make sure that only one person at a time is allowed to 
> work on
> a file so you don't overwrite each other's work.
> The downside is that it'll use up quite a lot of space because unlike 
> code
> source control it doesn't just save the changes.
>
> Document maintenance unfortunately is the name of our game. I keep a 
> front
> sheet with a version history where I put all the changes made as 
> specific as
> possible. And still team members will miss a change sometimes.
>
> For follow-up projects I have used colours to mark changes (all my
> wireframes are strictly black and white) which works really well to
> communicate change to clients at sign-off rounds. At the end of the 
> project
> I baseline everything back to black&white. This works well, but it's 
> still
> hard to communicate changes between version 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 to the 
> team.
>
> -Especially when you forgot to put that comma right there.. (uhhrg.. 
> back to
> the version history to exactly describe where that new comma went ;)
>
> regards,
> r.
>
>
> On 6/15/05 3:52 PM, "Kenyon, Aida N (AT - Atlanta)"
> <Aida.Kenyon at autotrader.com> wrote:
>
>> I was wondering if any of you had thoughts on how to manage a large
>> amount of product design documentation -- specifically a couple of
>> hundred paper-based (Visio) wireframes.  We are talking about one 
>> large
>> set of documentation being used by multiple designers (IAs) with
>> multiple concurrent projects and multiple development teams.  The two
>> big goals are to have up-to-date documentation at all times and to 
>> keep
>> document maintenance to an absolute low.
>>
>> So what are talking about?  Content Management Systems? Fancy 
>> processes?
>> Ditch the paper-based/Visio documentation? Source Code Management
>> systems but for design docs?  I'm open to any and all ideas.
>>
>> With thanks.
>> -Aida
>>
>> Aida Najarian Kenyon
>> Interaction Design/Information Architect
>> Autotrader.com
>> aida.kenyon at autotrader.com
>> AIM: aidankenyon
>> (404) 269-6844
>>
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