Software Project Documentation

Question

I work with a team that is working on a very large software project, we have tons of documentation written in MS WORD format with nohyperlinked indexes, without the ability to search. Every day we lose time trying to find the exact document or link.

I was wondering if there was a way or even a professional tool that would turn all this into a wiki format and, possibly, with a little manual (painful) help that would be organized into something that would improve accessibility. I use Google Desktop Search to make my life a little easier, but this is not the best solution.

I just want to know if any of you have had problems with similar problems and possible solutions to this problem.

Answer 1

Confluence wiki allows you to import Word documents. I was told that this is a really good wiki with lots of features.

Answer 2

Open Source: Trac Wiki

Trac Wiki is a popular open source option. There's even a thread on another Stack Exchange site about converting Word documents to the Wiki Wiki format . Some major or famous Trac users include Red Hat, Django, Handbrake, and SourceForge.

Commercial: Confluence

Confluence is another popular option that Alex Korban talked about. A good example of its widespread use is the Application Server 7 JBoss software community documentation.

2015 Update - PressGang and Corilla

I will just add a quick update that I so strongly agree with this issue of detectable content and collaboration, which I worked on to solve it in several different projects.

PressGang (prototype)

Check out the PressGang CCMS project to understand what we did at Red Hat to create tools to solve this problem. The lead engineer made an end-to-end video that you can see on Vimeo, and I created Amazon's public AMI if you want to try It. It is not supported, but it is all open source. Check out the repository or turn on the community plug .

Corilla (product)

It was an amazing experience that was part of and inspired me to break out of Corilla , open source exactly the problems you are talking about. This will have both a commercial / corporate version and an open source community version. There is a beta version in which I would encourage you to participate in - the problems that you encounter will be good to form the solutions that are built,

Answer 3

I don’t know about the tools for converting MS Word to Wiki, but if you save your documentation in ODF (XML format from OpenDocument), you should be able to import documents into your own program or convert them using XSL, and output them in Wiki format .

In this process, you can try to guess some links based on string matching.

The hard part in the command used to write documentation in a text editor (without using basic word processing functions such as indexes, tables of contents and hyperlinks) is to convince them to use another system that is not a typewriter.