DOCBOOK-APPS: docbook archives and workflows now!

[Dave Pawson <daveP@dpawson.freeserve.co.uk>]

This came up on another list.
Has anyone anything to say on managing K's worth of docbook files?

regards DaveP

Dan, I work for a software shop that produces a suite of integrated 
products. One of our challenges is managing (relating, versioning, reusing) 
the content in addition to producing print, HTML Help, and online output. We 
currently store our documents in Microsoft Word. Our documentation base of 
tens of thousands of topics (hundreds of thousands of pages), growing by 
upwards of twelve percent a year, is fast becoming unwieldy. We would like 
writers to devote more time to writing and less to file management, 
imperfect .doc to .htm conversion, and manual remarkup of help files.
We are considering the DocBook technology for markup. However, I haven't run 
into a description of a content or document or file management system for 
DocBook books that would give us the management capability we need. Once we 
have structured content, how can we work collaboratively, efficiently, and 
intelligently with a large and expanding web of intricately interrelated 
topics? We also need to interact with the in-house development log tracking 
system. We could, of course, build a proprietary application, but such 
wheels must already be turning, somewhere.
Can anyone on the list point me in a good direction?