An organization’s general goal for their DMS is usually to improve office productivity among all employees. This productivity can be improved through a variety of ways, including increased knowledge management; a greater consistency of communication, coordination, and collaboration; efficient data and document development through automated workflows; and easy accessibility to relevant document assets. This continued productivity can be ensured in the event of a disaster recovery scenario by having a DMS located in a secure cloud environment and being able to access that DMS from remote locations on various mobile devices.

The following tips address some of the more common and critical elements of proposal writing. However, this is not a comprehensive guide on proposal writing and does not replace broader texts and training courses that cover the complete set of principles for compliant and compelling proposal writing. The following tips would not necessarily take precedence over an organization’s recognized industry-standard style guide (such as the Chicago Manual of Style) and any internal style guides that may exist within that organization.

A mature software development lifecycle (SDLC) should be used to manage any elements of a DMS development project that require significant software development. In general, particular application development projects require different SDLC frameworks; each application development project should be managed using the appropriate SDLC for that project. In general, there are at least two types of software development frameworks that can be used: Waterfall and Agile.

Everyone wants to automate copyediting of their technical documents. This is understandable. Copyediting is a complex, somewhat mysterious function of document development, and not everyone has access to a professional copyeditor. There are software applications and document platforms that promise this automation. I analyzed one such application—PerfectIt—to determine if it was able to replace a human copyeditor. Here’s what I discovered.

A mature document-development process should be used to ensure quality document deliverables—both project-document deliverables during the DMS development and core-document deliverables after the DMS has been established and is supporting daily organizational operations. A mature document-development process or set of processes can be used to create document-development workflows in the DMS being developed.

To understand XML’s impact on technical editing, one must first look at a brief overview of the major editing phases of linear-based documentation. You can then examine the nature of XML before finally moving on to understanding how XML affects technical editing.