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Subject:Re: Distributing Word docs to customers From:PRASANNA PRABHU <prasanna_prabhu01012003 -at- yahoo -dot- co -dot- in> To:Fred Ridder <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>, mary_arrotti -at- yahoo -dot- com, techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Tue, 8 May 2007 11:45:27 +0530 (IST)
Mary Arrotti <mary_arrotti -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>We're currently debating pros & cons of how we distribute our documents to
>our customers. I'm more comfortable with distributing all our docs (other
>than Help) to customers in PDF format. This has been common practise in my
>experience. A coworker prefers distibuting our docs in Word format so our
>internal sales & support people can copy text from the docs. (However, we
>wouldn't want our customers to do this.) While the obvious solution might
>be to produce both formats - my coworker feels this unnecessarily
>complicates our process.
I feel you can distribute the documents in MS Word format.
To prevent customers from copying content from the documents, protect the documents before you send them across to persons/entities outside the company. To protect a document, Click Tools > Protect Document...Share the password with the internal sales and support people. You can probably use a password that can be agreed upon by all the internal stakeholders, such as, XXXXXDDMM. XXXXX can represent a combination of letters in your customer's name and name of your company/department. DDMM can represent the date and month of the day when the document was published. If any of your internal persons wants to copy content from such a document, he/she should enter the password with the right combination of names and date (which would probably be available in the revision history of the document or any such place where you would collectively decide to place the same).
This would also make your job that much easier; no hassles of converting the documents to pdf and you also save valuable memory...
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Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList
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Create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to Help file formats or
printed documentation. Features include support for Windows Vista & 2007
Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList
Now shipping: Help & Manual 4 with RoboHelp(r) import! New editor,
full Unicode support. Create help files, web-based help and PDF in up
to 106 languages with Help & Manual: http://www.helpandmanual.com
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