Hi Jean,
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.
Reviewing and proofreading are two very different activities. A
reviewer needs to be knowledgeable about the software being described,
so that he/she can check the accuracy of every statement made about it.
A proofreader is looking for quite different things: errors,
infelicities of style, bad cross-references, figures that don't show
what they're supposed to, etc. Logically this should be the last stage
before publication, when the reviewers have done all they want to. But
your work flow scheme doesn't allow for this.
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.
You can't eliminate the editor for the reasons given above. Reviewers
aren't editors. The two jobs need different types of thinking.
Possible different solution
Have 2 folders for each manual: "Work-in-progress" and "Published".
All work gets done on the file in "Work-in-progress" and there is only
ever one file for each chapter of a manual in the "Work-in-progress"
folder.Alfresco's versioning system updates the version number of the file
each time someone uploads some work done (via "Upload new version"
under "More..."). One can easily roll back to a previous version
number if necessary, or download an old version number if desired.Each worker enters a comment in the Alfresco comment box when
uploading, stating the work done (and/or in a comment field in the
document meta data).The same file is used even when work starts on updating a chapter to
take account of a new version of LibreOffice. In this case, the
LibreOffice version number is updated by a team member in the file's
meta data. You don't have to worry about incrementing any file version
number in the meta data, because Alfresco is handling the version
numbering.
So how will people know when something needs a review? Or a final
edit/proofreading? The traditional way was to put it in a specific
folder whose contents could be checked up on periodically. If you don't
do that, it would have to be done via the mailing list.