Is anyone planning exchanging Publisher files with non-designers?

[KipV]

I was having this discussion with Mike Wenzloff in a Quark forum yesterday which was a great help to where I may go with this workflow. I wanted to ask the same question here to see if there is any serious pitfall I am not seeing among other Affinity users.

I work for a company that does a lot of basic layouts; brochures, badges, mailers. I would like to buy Publisher for their machines so that I could just send them a Publisher file in Dropbox and they could change any text right from the program. They currently do this with MS Office files so it seems like moving to this workflow with our advertising would make as much sense. I'm on Mac they are on Windows and some also use iPads if Publisher comes to iPad at some point. Is anyone else doing something similar to this? Having that low price opens up workflows that I haven't tried before. I am also planning on incorporating other tools like Slack and Dropbox in this workflow.

[Distill7]

This depends on their knowledge of the software and how much their edits will change the layout. For example, if they were to change one worker name to another on a business card, that is fine, but if they need to change 200 words on a text frame with 500 words, the text frome will overflow and they'll need to do more complex job, like going to the master page, edit the text style...

[ivbera]

Sure it does depend on their knowledge. But I think that is not the problem. You can lock layers and handle the overflow another way.

I think the main problem are the resources. You can embedd them, but then the filesize is massive.
I prefer linked images, but I struggle to creat a workflow that works.
I have the files on a thumb drive or another external drive, which I hand over, but changing from windows to mac os the linking of the resources will be lost since the drive has another name. windows uses letters, mac os uses volume names.
I have not yet tested dropbox or other tools.

[KipV]

13 hours ago, toutou123 said:

This depends on their knowledge of the software and how much their edits will change the layout.

Probably about zero knowledge of graphics software due to it not being around when they were in school. Or close to zero. 

13 hours ago, toutou123 said:

the text frome will overflow and they'll need to do more complex job, like going to the master page, edit the text style...

I think they understand the idea of overflow text by just watching me work as they ask me to edit text they want. It should be a fairly easy concept to explain to them, the idea of expanding the size of the text boxes. Fortunately it doesn't get into the complexity of book design where linked text boxes gets a lot more complex, just one and two page design. I probably won't be using master pages for this type of work.

7 hours ago, ivbera said:

I prefer linked images, but I struggle to creat a workflow that works.

I haven't been using Publisher enough to know if it lets you pick between embedding and linking? I am thinking of putting together a employee badges that have their pictures so a file may have dozens of images. Their computers should have enough processing power to handle that though I would think. 

7 hours ago, ivbera said:

but changing from windows to mac os the linking of the resources will be lost since the drive has another name. windows uses letters, mac os uses volume names.

Presumingly Publisher has a relink dialog? As long as the images are kept in the same folder it would be a matter of selecting one of the files and the rest should link up too. Maybe this would be a case for embedding photos? That way we could just get around the broken link issue  entirely. 

7 hours ago, ivbera said:

I have not yet tested dropbox or other tools.

I think one of the things dropbox would get around is needing to deal with path related issues. Probably best to have links and be done in dropbox. Ideally the files should be available whenever they decide they want to change the text.