How to intelligently manage multiple documents with live references to each other that are edited by different groups of people?

Question

Say that my organization has a document that has all of its quality management procedures. We also have a document that has all the technical operating instructions. There's also a third document that has all of the customer interface requirements.

Is there a way, either natively with Word or with another software application, that these documents can make references to each other that stay live even when different groups of people might be editing different documents? If there is/are, is there a limit? Like, if there are 30 or so interrelated documents, can they all have living links to each other?

Answer 1

You may be able to do something by keeping individual bits in AutoText or some other Building Block held in several Global templates. Changes to the bits would need to be stored back as Building Blocks/AutoText, possibly by one person.

These bits of information can be incorporated into other documents and templates using AutoText fields. Printing or using Print Preview will usually update such fields.

Some things with your customer interface information might be handled with Mail Merge.

Otherwise, I think you would be looking at setting up a distributed relational database, which is way above my knowledge base.