nientenessuno.it

i’m searching a tool that could help us building documentation. By now we have some word document that we manage with a subversion server. We’re not so happy with this approch; documents are becoming to long to be managed. They have a fixed structure that force all the people thinking in the same way if they want to find information inside the doc. Finding bugs is becoming quite difficult. Last but not least, docs are a bad tool if you need to collaborate with other people writing things.

So we are thinking about the possibility to use a web tool to create product documentation. So i need your help finding the right tool. We need at least the following features:

• We don’t want an hosted service, the server must be installed on our server
• We need to have a strong version management of all content
• We need to create something like an indexed static version of the documentation in html (for web pubblication) or in pdf for distribution. Clients will access only stable version of the documentation
• Documentation must be rich of cross link and reference so customer could create their personal path through it
• Effective search and tagging would be really usefull

By now i’m thinking about a wiki to create contents but how can i publish them when ready? Another possibility could be a cms tool used to create a documentation site but we loose the strong cross-reference features that a wiki offer.

So, any suggestion?