Editor’s note: With this post, we welcome Will Kelly to the WebWorkerDaily team. Will is a technical writer, analyst and consultant living and working in the Washington, D.C. area. His current areas of interest include mobile computing, Web Office suites, online collaboration tools, unified communications, and social media.
Reviewing technical documentation presents a number of challenges in many organizations. Stakeholders and subject matter experts are too busy or too dismissive of documentation to give it a thorough review, meaning project managers and writers often need to follow up with face-to-face meetings. As web workers, we sometimes miss out on the opportunity for face-to-face contact, putting us at a greater disadvantage when managing document technical reviews. Therefore, it is imperative for us to put the right tools and processes in place to manage technical documentation collaboration and reviews.
LiveTechDocs can help. It’s an XML-basedĀ online collaboration and document review tool that is designed to handle technical documentation, unlike many of the collaborative editing tools that we’ve reviewed here on WWD.
The product is available in a few different flavors:
- Free Edition with only one project and a reduced number of users
- Writer Edition for freelance writers and small to medium businesses
- Open Source Edition is free to open-source software projects
- Education Edition for educational institutions
- Enterprise Edition for large corporations
LiveTechDocs earns high marks from me for a clean and consistent user interface. It is obvious this startup invested time, money and resources in the application’s user experience.

LiveTechDocs
LiveTechDocs supports both DocBook 4.x and DocBook 5.x as its standard formats. It’s simple to use: Upload your documents to the repository and then publish them. After publishing, it is ready for reviewers via the “Documentation” tab.
Using LiveTechDocs, authors and reviewers can review all of your XML-based documentation online. LiveTechDocs helps you manage the review by structuring the process, helping it be completed on deadline.
Review comments are all accessible from the dashboard. Document authors and management can also respond to reviewer comments from the dashboard, opening up a dialog between reviewer and writer.
Many online collaboration tool vendors have yet to embrace the technical documentation review process. LiveTechDocs includes management tools that provide status reports via email or online about reviewer comments and status and even remind reviewers when they are running late. Such an audit trail is critical for geographically dispersed teams seeking to improve their document review cycles. I’d like to see more collaborative tools adopt such management features.
If you are working on XML-based technical documentation then LiveTechDocs is worth a look for its review, management and collaboration tools.
What tools do you use for managing technical document review?
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