Managing project documentation

Project help for project owner administration: Index

Project owner administration
  Editing and maintaining the Project Home page
  Managing project site news
  Managing project files
  Adding project members and approving roles
  Configuring and managing project mailing lists
  You are here: Managing project documentation
  - About your project documentation
  - Adding/maintaining documents and sections
  - Approving documentation suggestions
  Managing project source code
  Managing project issues and generating reports
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About your project documentation

Either you or members of your project can make your project's working documents available for viewing and sharing through the Project Documents List page. These can be binary or other file format uploads, URLs, and HTML pages. The documents you include here come under your project's version control.

Project documentation is meant to be distinct from files available through the Project Files page. Both features let you publish a variety of files and documents, but project documentation is intended to organize works in progress. Project files, on the other hand, should reflect any finished work being made available for download, the results of your project's efforts to date.

Adding/maintaining documents and sections

You can add projects documents by clicking Add New Document link to display the Add Project Document page. Use the input fields in this page to enter the document name that will appear in the Project Documents page, a brief description of the document, then select one of the three document options for submitting document:

- Locate the file by browsing your local machine directories
- Enter the URL for online documents
- Cut and paste the document's HTML content directly into a text box.

The maximum size allowed for each uploaded document is 25 MB. Documents larger than this cannot be accepted. If you have a document to add that is larger than 25 MB, consider breaking into two or more smaller files.

Choose which section the document should be placed in on the Project Documents page or leave the default selection of "none" which places the document at the top level. Finally, click the "Add Document" button.

If you want to create a new section, click the Add New Section link in the top right corner of the Project Documents List page to display the Add a Document Section page. Here you may create a new section, enter a description of it, and designate its place within your project's documentation hierarchy. However, document subsections can only be created two levels deep.

If you need to update document information, move documents to different sections, or remove documents altogether, use the Edit and Delete links in the Project Documents List page. You may also rearrange the hierarchy of documentation subsections you have created or delete sections altogether. If a subsection you wish to delete contains documents, you can choose to delete everything or move the documents to the top level.

Approving documentation suggestions

Project members can suggest documents and/or new sections for document organization, but these are not added to the Project Documents List page until you give your approval. Project members' view of this page features links to suggest new documents and sections.

Suggested documents appear in the "Pending Actions" section of your Start Page. Both suggested documents and sections appear in your view of the Project Documents List page. The Pending Approval links adjacent to suggested documents/sections lead to the Project Document Approval page where you can approve, defer, or disapprove each item using the radio buttons. Then click the "Perform Actions" button to complete the task.

The actions you take as Project Owner in response to suggested documents and sections automatically generate email notifications to the users who suggested the documents, and include instructions for them to contact you directly by email if they have further questions about your action. When you disapprove a suggested document, you are prompted to give the reason for your decision. This reason is included verbatim in the email notification to the user who suggested the document.

For example, since the maximum document upload size is 25 MB per document, if one of your project members suggests a document that exceeds this limit, you can disapprove the document but also include a suggestion to break the document into smaller pieces to address this.

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