I've been tasked with solving a tricky problem at my office. Briefly: We've got a technical manual that needs to be printed each time we sell a piece of equipment. Currently, the manual is produced using a combination of MS Access DB and a convoluted Word doc that uses Mail Merge to pull data from the Access DB into the appropriate fields. The DB has a hundred tables or so, and some of the tables are "calculated" values - i.e. the value in the fields is calculated based on values entered in other tables within the DB. The Word doc uses some kind of "if-then-else" logic to determine which tables to use for which fields when building the doc. This whole setup is currently maintained by the engineering, sales, and marketing departments.
We currently use FM11 (unstructured) in the Technical Writing department, and my boss is asking me to figure out a way to migrate the Access/Word doc described above to a format we can use so we can take ownership of the documentation process for this particular line of equipment. I suspect the variables involved here go way beyond what we can do with conditional text and variables within FM, but I'm wondering if Structured FM (either 11 or 12) is more suited to this project, either by using some sort of conduit between FM and an SQL DB, or directly within FM using conditinal text, variables, or some other organizational function present in either FM11 or FM12.
Any guidance here would be appreciated. I'm not even sure what questions to ask at this point to get a proper shove in the right direction.