Hi Aaron,
Without knowing anything about your knowledge or experience, it would be
impossible for someone else to estimate how long it would take you. I can
tell you what needs to be done, and you can estimate from there. When I do
consulting, I break a project down into work items, such as the following:
1. Select the subset of DocBook that works with the roundtripping
stylesheets and meets your needs.
2. Develop design specifications for those elements for the Word and PDF
outputs. Do you also need HTML or other outputs?
3. Develop the Word template to those specs.
4. If necessary, enhance the WordML-to-DocBook (and reverse) conversion
stylesheets to meet your specs.
5. Develop the FO customization layer to meet your specs. Likewise for
other output formats.
6. Develop the validation and processing scripts, and assemble into a
toolkit.
7. Test and revise.
8. Write documentation for the users and maintainers.
9. Train the users and maintainers.
Perhaps others have suggestions for work items I have missed.
With the WordML solution, it is important to manage expectations. Users
won't be able to use all the features of Word, nor all the elements of
DocBook. They will have to follow more rules than when using Word as a word
processor. Most of the rules can't be enforced (validated) in Word, and
will only become enforcable when the DocBook files are validated.
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
DocBook Consulting
bobs@sagehill.net