Keeping everyone in the know

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Aitch
Posts: 544
Joined: Thu Jun 10, 2004 4:52 pm
Location: Manchester, UK

Keeping everyone in the know

Unread post by Aitch »

Hi all,

I have been at my new company 5 months now, and still enjoy all the challenges it brings.
But, there is about 2 years' work ahead to get just the current stuff up to date (including rebranding and reskinning etc). Which isn't the reason for this topic..

Word has gone out that there is a new TA (me! :) ) at the office, so everyone is now starting to wonder where all the new manuals are.
I will be having a thinking session with my manager next week to come up with an idea of how to keep everyone in the loop of where we are up to, and what we have prioritised.

Now, here is my question - what do you use / how do you keep others up to date?
We have SharePoint, where I put released versions in.
We also have Subversion - which again, I don't really use much at the moment - I will do, once I'm up to date and new versions are released.

So, I started a spreadsheet - which I think will be the quickest way to keep everyone updated.
I decided to have categorise in Phases (with the versions linking to the document location)
Phase 1 - rebrand and reskin
Phase 2 - Update images and refresh links (OLD helpfiles with broken links - imported from a robohelp)
Phase 3 - Update content to current / latest version
Phase 4 - Released

It seems straightforward at the moment, but would this be overthinking it?
With so many software packages we have, I want something that people can have a quick look of where we are up to - instead of sending countless emails asking where we are up to. I also don't want to create a reference document that after 2 months won't be used (although I will point them in the right direction with every email :))

I guess I'm looking for a bit of inspiration from my fellow Authors.

Any suggestions?

ps. hope it all makes sense.

Thanks
Heidi
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