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Migration from PDF, MS Word and Frontpage?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-the-right-tools-for-the-job dept.

l337hx0r asks: "I've just began work at a government department who, with 24 branches and five years at their disposal, has managed to create 85,000 proprietary documents. The current IT manager doesn't see a problem with this, and the government recommendations of open formats came as quite a surprise. I want to move this intranet away from WYSIWYG to a logical document structure (Docbook, Tex, XHTML), though the migration tools have been quite disappointing. Can it be done?"

1 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Yes. by RGRistroph · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, it can be done.

    The easy part is converting and indexing all the docs. Not that that is easy. What I would do is something along the lines of scripts to convert them to html and put them in a database with a web browsable front end, building indexes of keywords, accompanied by A LOT of manual labour inserting meta-information about each document.

    Almost any document editor these days can import and export html.

    The hard part is getting people to start using it. They won't insert their new documents, they won't use it to efficiently look up stuff instead of poking around in their harddrives and email archives, they will just keep doing what got them in trouble in the first place.

    And the only thing you can do about it is get a new job.

    Hope that helps.