InCopy CS6 and InDesign CS6 workflow

Question

Hi there, I just started a 3 day per week job at an architecture firm. They have about 35 staff, and use Word to format some pretty hefty reports. They are in one column, rather ugly and doesn’t reflect at all the professionalism of the firm.
I’m looking at trying to integrate the workflow, so that they can maybe use InCopy and InDesign together, effectively replacing Word for report use. I’m only in 3 days so it’s impossible for me to use a Word > InDesign workflow with the amount of changes (mostly last minute and to tight deadlines). It just takes too long. The architects and historians need to be able to write these reports themselves, with my skills coming in when it's the final format ready to send to the client.
We have licences for about 5 copies of InDesign CS5 at the moment, and 35 licenses for Word, so we’re looking at the costings and if the InCopy to InDesign workflow would work well for much of the communication here. The report writers use hundreds of images/diagrams in each document, and all these have captions, so I guess it’s important to use an inline compatible design where the users can add images in InCopy and these are brought over to InDesign without too much fiddling around at the end.
The aim is to have the report writers use a collaborative system, but using corporate open type fonts that display well on screen. We are using Trade Gothic, and it doesn't represent on screen very well at all. The report writers hate using it, especially as their zoom size in Word is normally around 90%.. The other problem is the lack of layout optiions with Word. The reports could save hundreds of pages just by using a 2 column system which can save rivers of blank white space within text.
Also we need the ability for the writers to be able to add images and resize/rotate landscape portait format etc.
I’ve downloaded a trial version of InDesign CS6 and InCopy CS6 so am just checking things out and testing it at the moment.

Answer 1

Using Dropbox for InCopy/InDesign workflows works really well. You keep all your projects in Dropbox as though it was a networked, local server.
I will be doing an hour-long session at PePcon (the Print + ePublishing Conference) on "The state of the state" of open source or low cost editorial workflows, covering InCopy, Word, GoogleDocs, and InDesign plug-ins. Really great conference to go to if you're using InDesign for publishing. (note: I'm a co-host, too.)
http://pepconference.com
AM