Managing Multiple Documents in a PDF

Question

I was just hoping to get some advice for my project.
I have created a User's Manual for my company.  The manual was made in Word with the intent of porting it to a PDF.  Each section in the manual has its own Word document.  I then did the "Combine in PDF" option to put them together. In the PDF there are a number of links within the documents, specifically on the table of contents as well as bookmarks.
The problem lies in the updating of the manual.  I will not be maintaining the manual so I have to document an easy way for other people to make changes to the manual.  The best way I could find would be for them to make changes to the Word document, turn it into a PDF, delete those pages (that section) from the PDF, and then re-insert the section via Document>Insert pages.  Lastly, you'd have to go back and update any links to those pages, as well as add bookmarks for those pages and then update the page numbering.
While this method works, Acrobat doesn't recognize the inserted pages as a document, but rather as a bunch of unique pages.  Whereas immediately after making the initial PDF file it does.  This is only a real issue because when it's recognized in its unique parts it's easy to delete the pages as a group.
Mainly I'm asking - is there a better solution to managing a bunch of Word documents (roughly 14) in a PDF?  If not, is there a way to get Acrobat to recognize the sections of the combined manual as individual documents?
This is really the first time I've used Acrobat, so I was hoping for some experienced user's advice.  I'm open to any and all suggestions/recommendations.
Thanks!

Answer 1

<on high horse>The best way to do this is not to use Word! You really want to create all your links, TOC, Index, etc in your original program. Update the files as needed and regenerate the pdf file so as to keep everything consistent. My recommendation would be FrameMaker, though these days perhaps InDesign would be a candidate for the mix.
I know the arguement for using Word. We own it, the manual is finished, the people that will maintain it know how to use it. However, they will not know how to manage the final product in Acrobat, they will not be that conversant with Word's capabilties for making links in Word, creating TOC, Index, and managing the links in Word. In the long run FrameMaker is the better choice and will take less work. In fact, with the Technical Communications Suite's Robohelp you can also generate html files for the help system and use Captivate to make the content more compelling. Frame can import the Word files you created and if you did a good job of using styles the work of conversion from Word to FrameMaker won't be that hard. Remember well done user manuals are never finished, they are just the initial version until the next product update!
If you really want to keep Word, Robohelp can convert your Word files to an html based help system as well.</on high horse>
Sorry if I'm not being more helpful. Maybe someone that uses Word extensively can comment on how Word can do all of the above without needing to resort to manual linking in Acrobat. It may actually be possible.
...Mike