Hi Ian,
thanks for your quick and detailed response!
Yesterday I talked to some colleagues who have some experiences with the Master Document approach of Word. All of them told me: FORGET IT!
According to them, it is very slow and crashes from time to time. In one of the projects (non-architectural document with around 10 sub documents), it even stopped working completely in the end. Since then, trying to generate the complete document always fails at the point of expanding the subdocuments. So they needed to create the document from scratch by manually copying & pasting the content of the sub documents to a new document. Fortunately, after sending it to the customer, no further maintenance was needed. That is of course different for architectural documents, which may need maintenance for years or even decades.
I cannot judge whether the problems are inherent to Word or whether we may have used it in an improper way, but for now I think I will follow a slightly different approach. I will (let eaDocX) generate independent Word documents for the features and (manually) add references to these documents in the main architecture document. This way the architects can work on their components independently and release new document versions whenever they want without affecting anybody else. Does it make sense?
I have created 2 additional questions with respect to this approach in
1428-placeholder-in-document-template and 1429-custom-information-in-document-information
It would be great if you could have a look at them.
Thanks and regards
Markus
