Hi Jean,
BTW, this wiki page includes a diagram of the workflow used by
ODFAuthors for many years for docs production. The descriptive text is
a bit out of date (especially info on naming convention) and not
relevant to Alfresco (again, naming convention), but the general flow
is one I think should be adapted to work with the Alfresco tools.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Development#First_steps_with_the_Documentation_team
OK, the workflow we originally set-up on Alfresco is a bit like Snakes
& Ladders. The doc start in the "Drafts" folder. A considered-ready
draft gets approved and goes forward to the "Review" folder. A
reviewer proofreads it, and either it gets approved and gets moved
forward to the "Publish" folder, or it gets rejected and goes back to
"Drafts". The act of approval or rejection (it wasn't always actually
used) was to click on one of two menu options in the right-hand menu
that appears when your mouse pointer hovers over the document. The
result was that Alfresco would move the document to one folder or the
other.
When the doc actually lands in the Publish folder, the bells sound and
the doc gets published.
This is a manual process in which a team member downloads the document
from Alfresco, generates a PDF from it, has to log into the wiki,
upload the documents, edit/update the links in the wiki page with the
published documents list
(http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications). Then
the team member has to log into libreoffice.org and update the docs
download page (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/)
with the new links from the wiki.
Note: some of the tracking functionality is done within the document,
using LibreOffice's changes tracking and comments features. I have
missed out on the "Feedback" folder (insert additional snake/ladder).
Questions: Is there a real need for more than Draft/Review/Publish
folders? What is the real value of the Feedback folder? Could we
usefully just eliminate it and simplify things?
Question: The workflow described on the wiki involves 4 roles -
Writer, Reviewer, Editor, Publisher. Could we usefully simplify that
to Writer and Reviewer? Editor and Publisher could potentially be
eliminated, because of my file-naming suggestion below.
Suggestion: On Alfresco, you could usefully revise the file-naming
conventions. Keep the conventions as regards the title of the manual.
But remove the version info from the filename. Instead, decide what
fields you want to have in the meta data of each file, and store the
version info in there only. The advantages I'd see are discussed
below.
Suggestion/thoughts: I guess this is stating the obvious, but
ultimately the team needs to choose between the current ODFAuthors
tool and Alfresco. Having both described in
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications
*probably* discourages a lot of potential contributors because of the
complexity of the functioning. IMHO, even the workflow on either tool
is *possibly* more complex than necessary. Either move to Alfresco
(hosted either on http://alfresco.libreoffice.org or on
http://odfauthors.org) or stay with the Plone tool? OK, irrelevant to
the current thread. Forget I said that...
Possible different solution