Authoring tool that works in the cloud?

[Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

You ask:
Is there a DTP or HAT (or both) that works in the cloud? If so, does anyone have 
any experience with such a tool?

I say, step back a bit and ask this:
Is there an authoring system that works well with online collaboration?

Cloud security issues go away, and all your remote people rely on a VPN to make 
their connections.  If you're talking about remote developers, then that must be 
the case anyway, since they're accessing source control, among other things.

First, I would expect they use JavaDocs and lots of good commenting in their 
code.  So that level of docs should already by intranet-wide.

Second, I would suggest they move all their Word docs onto a WIKI -- it's free 
or cheap, light-weight on the client, the editor is even more ubiquitous than 
Word, more stable, numbering works, no special OS-level tricks, no RIBBON GUI, 
and it allows for full and free collaboration from anywhere.  Simple in-house 
conventions can distinguish between comments, proposed content, accepted 
content, etc.  For published docs, you step in and harvest the WIKI content to 
publish in your DTP/HAT of choice.  I have experience with this and it works 
well.

If they insist on Word as the transport format, deploy SharePoint.  If you reach 
any serious volume of content, you still need to harvest it and run it through a 
predictable DTP/HAT.

In any event, it sounds like you have the pleasant opportunity to participate in 
the design of their doc system.  Look to the future, think about sustainable 
processes, and have fun!

<rant>
Why startups *ever* use something like Word (or any other proprietary word 
processor) for their design docs is beyond me.  WIKI is the way to go.  For 
their initial customer docs, I can almost understand the choice.  But it's 
short-sighted to start cranking out such docs without at least thinking about 
hooks to the final doc solution.  Would they start writing code without source 
control, for example?  

</rant>
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