Tab three · Handbook pages
What a handbook page holds
A page in Infovative is the text of one of your documents, with four things added around it: an owner, a review date, links to related pages and a running list of change notes. Those additions are what turn a folder of files into a handbook that people can rely on.
Tab three · Owner
A page owner, named at the top
Every page shows who answers for it. An owner can be a person or a role, such as "office manager" or "warehouse lead", which is often better because roles outlast the people holding them. When a role changes hands, the new holder inherits every page attached to it and sees them on their own list.
The owner is the person a reader should ask when a page seems wrong, and the person who receives the reminder when its review date arrives. The owner does not have to be the author of the source file, though in small teams the two are frequently the same. A page without an owner is shown in the index with a marker, because an unowned page is the first to drift out of date.
Owners are set by editors. Assigning one does not give that person extra access to anything; it only puts the page on their list and their name on the page.
Tab three · Review date
Review dates that are kept, not just written
Most teams already put "review annually" at the bottom of their policies. The trouble is that a line of text cannot remind anyone. In Infovative, the review date is a field on the page. Editors set it when the page is first bound in, and the owner sees upcoming dates on a short list ordered by what falls due first.
When the date passes, the page is marked as due in the index and at the top of the page itself. Readers can still open it; the marker simply tells them it has not been looked at recently. Once the owner has read the source and is content that it still holds, they confirm the review and choose the next date. If something needs changing, they change the source file, and the page follows on the next read.
You choose how often each kind of page is reviewed. A fire-drill checklist might be looked at more often than a description of the office kitchen, and the handbook does not impose one rhythm on both.
Tab three · Links and notes
Related pages and change notes
Related pages sit at the foot of each page. An editor links the expenses checklist to the travel guidance, or the first-week notes to the access request how-to, so that a reader who lands on one finds the others without searching again. Links are kept when a page is moved within the index, and removed automatically if the linked page is withdrawn.
Change notes record what moved. When a source file is updated, the page lists which sections were added, removed or reworded, with the date of the read that found the change. An editor can add a short explanation, such as "approval now goes to the team lead", which is often the only sentence a reader needs.
Change notes accumulate in order, newest first, so a page shows its own history without anyone keeping a separate log. They describe the document, not the people: the note says that a section changed, not who edited the file on the drive.
Want to see your own documents laid out this way? A walk-through binds a sample folder in front of you.
