Terminology

External (or Customer) Document

Any document primarily distributed to external customers. An external document may be distributed internally as well. Practically, external document types span from Release Folder Collections, User Manuals, Maintenance Manuals, to Administrator Manuals, etc. taken only at the final (accepted) stage of their development. Emails, or unformal comments are never parts of Customer Documents.

Hypertext

A way to navigate in on-line documents by using a feature implemented in all Web browsers and consisting of clicking highlighted words (usually colored or underlined) in a page to bring another page of related information to your screen. Hypertext cannot be implemented in paper documents.

Internal Document

Any document never distributed to external customers. Practically, they span from Requirements sheets, Architecture Descriptions, Feasibility Studies, Functional Descriptions, to Design Documents, etc. at any stage of their development, mostly intermediate or not accepted. Although Emails cannot be strictly considered as documents, they can be quoted or referred to by internal documents.

Review Comments

Review comments play a capital role in the achievement of each phase of SW development. SW projects E1-E5 phases generates a huge volume of formal or informal comments which have been so far handled officially in most projects in a paper-like approach. The concern was then purely Quality Standards fulfillment. Needless to say, this approach has been more and more replaced by exchange of Email, or, better, implementation of dedicated News Servers (open: NNTP or proprietary: Lotus Notes). See cnnews implementation of a NNTP server in NMS/NMS for Data.