Documentation of a software project

Question

I am working with a team that works on a very large software project, we have tons of Documentation that is written in MS WORD format with nohyperlinked indexes, no search ability. Everyday we waste our time trying to find the exact document or reference.

I was thinking if there was way or even a professional tool that would convert all this into a wiki format and maybe with a little manual (painful) help be organised into something that improves the accessibility. I use Google Desktop Search to make my life a little easier but its not the best solution

I just want to know if any of you faced similar problems and possible solutions to this issue.

Answer 1

Don't know about tools to convert MS Word to a Wiki, but if you save your documentation in ODF (The XML format from OpenDocument) it should be possible to import the documents in your own program, or transform them using XSL, and output them in Wiki format.

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

The difficult part, in a team used to write documentation in a word processor (without even using word processing basic features like indexes, table of contents and hyperlinks), is to convince them to use another system that is not a typewriter.

Answer 2

Confluence wiki lets you import Word documents. I've been told it's a really good wiki with a lot of features.

Answer 3

I started using MindTouch's collaborative knowledge base product about 3 months ago and it too has a simple Word connector. This would especially be useful for you if more than 1 person on your team is authoring/editing documentation.