Scott Penrose <scottp@dd.com.au> writes:
I am working now in an environment which is all word on dropbox [...] * Wiki (there is a Confluence system available for me to use) - but no offline editing, and terrible word/pdf output formatting
I would be promoting a VCS-backed wiki like ikiwiki or gitit. Your sales pitch would be something like - it's web based, and everyone loves that, right? - it's VCS backed without reminding users to turn on VCS inside word - it's on your own equipment, so <data sovereignty> FUD - power users can leverage git directly for deep magic - it can do OKish output to PDF &c - if a document really does need complicated formatting, you can always put just that one in dropbox. In my own office (which predominantly technical engineers, and 100% foss weenies) I rolled out gitit, because my SHOULDs included git and reST, and it looked to support reST better than ikiwiki. (It does, but it's a buggy in places.) I think that has worked out pretty well - the managers can cope with editing it as a wiki, and the engineers can edit it as reST text files in a git repo. I kinda hoped moinmoin would support git as a backend by now, but last I heard that was a SoC project that had been cancelled or something.
* Build system (some text editable format I can use to generate the word docs).
Problem with that is getting updates from other people back into it. Incidentally I received a docx yesterday and docx2text worked excellently without me needing to install 100MB of openoffice libraries (it's a shitty little perl script). If you need to continue interacting with .docx, you could at least set up something like svn, with tortoise for the normals, and tell it to unzip the .docx and normalize its XML as a pre-commit hook. That makes it diffable (to the extent that XML is diffable), at least. Since I mostly operate out of email, I also find it helpful to just ASCIIfy anything that comes in and send it back in the main text body. By the second round the other guy tends not to care anyway, because the whole discussion is happening over email, so it's just inline text instead of a docx attachment. I'd still use a VCS on my end, though, and then PDFize the final ratified version of the document.