Document Control and Distribution - How to save paper?

[energy]

Yup

Mike s.,

Steel has it right. When you browse for the file in word that you want to include in your "support" file, you select the latest revision. Dump the old ones and track revisions in the revision section, usually within the document itself. I believe it was Laura M. that introduced me to the method. I love it. We won't get into the security aspects, because you need a secure drive with read only access and hope you don't have criminals in your company who want to create havoc. Smart ones. That is if you can't make pdf files. If you want an example, I'll send it to you regular e-mail, like Laura did for me. But, you have to supply me with your e-mail, Lean!

 

[M Greenaway]

More food for thought.

If we use hyperlinks do we need to continue using document references at all ?

In Word text you can hyperlink off of any piece of text. So your text might read 'and if a non-conformance is found you follow the Control of Non-Conformance Procedure' and just hyperlink off this text.

aint technology a wonderful thing !

 

[Mike S.]

Thanks muchly, Steel and Energy. As soon as I saw your posts I experienced one of those "well, duh!" moments -- meaning I was being kinda dense (again). Sounds like a plan the next time I set-up a doc system or rejigger the current one. I'm a stickler for keeping old revisions of stuff for "knowledge preservation". In my biz, I or one of my co-workers find the need fairly often to go back and look at the old stuff. Heck, we even have a customer who orders to old as well as new rev's if you can believe that one! I'll just dump the old rev's. into an "archive" folder.

(BTW, Energy -- or should I say Jim: How did you figure me out? )

 

[SteelMaiden]

M Greenaway said:

More food for thought.

If we use hyperlinks do we need to continue using document references at all ?

In Word text you can hyperlink off of any piece of text. So your text might read 'and if a non-conformance is found you follow the Control of Non-Conformance Procedure' and just hyperlink off this text.

aint technology a wonderful thing !

M, I do that all the time. Anytime I refer to another controlled document, I link it then and there. One thing that I might mention...I don't do MSWord in web creation, but use an actual web publishing software. FrontPage, which now does belong to mickeysoft, but did not always.

This is a great time saver for me, because if there are any major re-writes, or a deletion of a document, I can (prior to deletion) check all of my hyperlinks, open each document that linked to the one to be deleted and make whatever revisions I need. Kills two birds with one stone.

I still put a complete list on each web page of all the referenced documents...just in case someone wants to quickly find some form that is filled out, or some other doc that they can't remember the name of.

 

[Mike S.]

Any other tricks of the (hyperlink) trade that anyone can suggest? Possible pitfalls? Helpful hints?

I think I'll do a small "dummy" (appropriate, huh?) document set w/ hyperlinks for practice before I do it for real just to make sure I've got my T's dotted and my I's crossed.

 

[SteelMaiden]

Mike S. said:

Any other tricks of the (hyperlink) trade that anyone can suggest? Possible pitfalls? Helpful hints?

I think I'll do a small "dummy" (appropriate, huh?) document set w/ hyperlinks for practice before I do it for real just to make sure I've got my T's dotted and my I's crossed.

Use relative links instead of absolute, just in case you ever have to move your web to another server.

Flat webs are easiest to maintain.

If you use color in your text, make sure not to use the colors you use for hypertext (either link or viewed link)

Remember, links usually default to look like underlined text, so be judicious (sp?) in your use of underlined text elsewhere to avoid confusion of users.

I think that these are probably the biggies, I am sure we could write a book if we put everyone's experience together.

 

[Graeme]

Sharing is wonderful

Bob_M said:

Your program sounds GREAT!!!!
The PDF is something I'd like our company to use soon.
How do you electronically approve your documents?
We currently have one electronic master, with a few paper binders.
But our conversion to and "offical" online version is so new we have not worked out a system for approving them yet.

Any tips?

I think everyone else jumped in and said everything I would have. Thanks to Energy, SteelMaiden, Mike S, Jim Wade and M Greenaway in this thread -- and to all of the others we have "obtained" the ideas from before, epecially Laura M and E Wall. That said, here I go to expand at length on some of the high points.

• Changes to existing documents are requested by e-mail. The need for new documents may be identified that way or by other methods as well.
• The OLD version of the Microsoft Word source document is saved in a separate folder with a separate name -- "QP4230 document control.doc" might be saved as "QP4230 document control 20020514.doc" if the earlier version was dated May 14, 2002.
• The process owner, document coordinator and other affected team members run everything through whatever is needed to produce a draft revision. (At this point it is still a Word document.)
• If necessary, the draft is sent to everyone for review. It is sent by e-mail using Outlook's voting and tracking feature. Everyone votes yes/no on approval, can edit it, and you can tell who has not even read it yet and ping on them.
• When ready for final approval it is sent to whoever does that, again by e-mail. Outlook again is used to record the votes.
• When the document is approved, several things happen. (1) The document coordinator converts the Word document to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. (2) The file is digitally signed (an internal feature of Acrobat 4.0 and later) and appropriate security levels are set. (3) The document coordinator copies the new PDF file to the document folder on the server. Since it has the same name as the old one, it instantly replaces it and no hyperlinks have to be changed. (4) An e-mail is sent to all users telling them of the change. A read reciept enables Outlook to track who has read it.
• The e-mail messages are moved to a public folder in Outlook, so they can be viewed by any user. That provides the paper trail. After a defined period they are archived.
• We do not use revision numbers or letters. The date the file is saved is in the footer of page 1. As long as the document is a Word document, that date is kept updated by the system (it is a built-in field that you can insert.) When it is printed to a PDF file the save date is frozen and is treated as the revision date and version.

Hyperlinks can be placed in either the original Word document or the PDF file. I find putting them in the Word file easier. Basically, any time there is a reference to another document or form I try to make it a hyperlink. This also works for links inside files, and if you make a Table of Contents using the Word field then Acrobat will automatically link that for you. I have also found that, if you want to link to a file that doesn't exist yet, the easiest thing to do is put a dummy file with that name in the folder. When the "real" one is created, it will automatically replace the dummy.

Digital signature - this is NOT an image of your pen-on-paper signature. A digital signature is based on something called public-key encryption. (A web search on that term will give you more than you ever wanted to know!) When you digitally "sign" a document, your private key is used to make a short encrypted "digest" that is attached to the file. Other people can verify who signed it and when, and verify that the document has not been changed since then. (Secured PDF files are hard to tamper with anyway, but this also makes any tampering attempt easily detectable.) The system uses your "public" key to do that. But nobody (with the possible exception of NSA?) can use that to discover your private key. Signatures can be added on top of each other if needed, in case the number of signatures must equal the number of pages before the document can be released. Also, assuming you practice good password control, nobody can forge your digital signature. The only way it can get onto a document is if you put it there. ("Good password control" means at least never ever give your password to anyone for any reason, no matter how trusted they are.)

Other administrivia: the PDF file on the server IS the controlled copy. The web page that serves as the index IS the master list. The footer of each document page has wording to the effect that if it is on paper, or if it is not on the designated file server, it is not controlled. While everyone can read documents on the server, very few have the rights to add, remove or modify them.

By the way, all of this asumes that everyone in the company has access to the computer system ...

____________
Graeme

 

[energy]

Re: Sharing is wonderful

Graeme said:

I think everyone else jumped in and said everything I would have. Thanks to Energy, SteelMaiden, Mike S, Jim Wade and M Greenaway in this thread -- and to all of the others we have "obtained" the ideas from before, epecially Laura M and E Wall. Graeme

Graeme,

Correct me if I'm mistaken. Was it you that said word was too "unstable" for hyperlinking from document to document? I wanted to password protect, say my procedure and hyperlink to documents/forms contained in it. When I tried to password protect in "form", Word would not allow me to protect it adequately. I guess I could could go back, way back and check. I remember that you can protect in "form" making it unalterable, only once. We won't get into the safecracker who broke my secured document into little pieces and returned it to me edited. That's why we went pdf documents, but hyperlinking is the way, even in Adobe. Clean and neat.
Martin, why not? The link shows up when you move the cursor over text. Maybe, too much of a guessing game for the ones who want easy?

 

[Mike S.]

SteelMaiden said:

Flat webs are easiest to maintain.

Steel,

Can you please explain what a "flat web" is and contrast it with the alternative (a bumpy web? ). Thanks!!!

 

[SteelMaiden]

If you use a web publishing software, (and maybe using word, I am not that familiar with creating webs entirely from Word) you can just save all your documents in the web, sort of like saving all of your files in a my documents folder, no matter what they were created with. That is a flat web, no hierarchy. On the other hand, you could save the html files in a nested, or tree type hierarchy, similar to saving your typical MS Office documents in seperate folders (maybe by type, or subject) inside another "parent" folder on some certain drive.

The less you need to jump from level to level, folder to folder, however it is easiest to envision, the fewer chances you have for broken links to occur.

There are some things you can do with nested, or hierarchy based webs that you can't with flat webs. You can add bots to all pages in one level but not the rest in a hierarchy based web, in a flat web, you either add a bot to all the pages in the web, or you have to add it individually to whichever pages you want it on.

Just in case someone wonders what a bot is....I know when I started designing webs, I did not, it is an html page that you can insert into other html pages. I typically use a bot to add navigation tools to each html page. It seems like for Q-stuff, your navigation requirements are much more complex and/or lengthy than what the navigation banner templates you can insert handle well. A template of navigation buttons typically only fits 3-5 buttons nicely on the screen, but I usually end up with 8-10 navigation buttons by the time I add links to environmental, safety, the intranet home page, quality home page + policy, procedure, WI, forms, reference doc indices, etc.

The nice thing about html and placing documents in a web is that I can create a search page using the template and any employee, or auditor, can type in a search phrase or word, and get a list of all the documents that contain it. You can't get that with .pdf files (at least as far as I know, I may be wrong). I know my web is secure, because the only way you can edit it is to have both a copy of the software and the proper admin priveleges, whereas 450 people have access to MSWord here and several are very good at computer stuff!

Hope I answered your questions, I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to make sense half the time!