Before you enable document bursting, consider the following items that may impact your burst configuration.

If you have a large writing staff, you may encounter situations where two or more authors need access to the same chapter or section. If this is the case, you may consider bursting documents at a deeper level so your writing staff has more objects to author and will likely encounter fewer object collisions.

If you are unsure what direction your documentation needs will take in the future, it is better to specify a shallow burst specification. If, for example, you started with a burst specification that burst documents at the chapter level, and later decided to burst at the first-section-level, this would not cause a problem. As you opened documents that were burst at the chapter level, the new deeper burst specification would re-burst the document and create the desired objects during check in.

If, however, you started with a deeper first-section-level burst specification, and later pulled back to chapter-level bursting, you would be forced to flatten the first-section-level objects into your chapter objects manually.

While you should be considering your authors' current needs, do not forget to consider how your documentation will evolve. If you are currently working primarily with printed documentation, chapters might be the finest granularity you require. If, however, you are preparing to publish to HTML Help or the Web, you may want to present data in smaller pieces. In that case, you may want to consider bursting documents at a deeper level.

Consider your current usage of file entities or XML inclusions and how well that will migrate into your burst configuration. If you find that your file entity usage was for smaller pieces placed deeper than your deepest burst element, it should be fine to set your burst specification to place the file entities or XML inclusion objects in the PTC Server and continue to maintain the references. If, however, you find that your file entities or XML inclusions are at the level of one of your burst elements, you may want to flatten the content of the entity in your source document and allow the PTC Server connection to burst the element so it is consistent with other similar elements that were not contained in a separate file entity. Use the ACL alias doc_flatten to flatten your document before storing it in the PTC Server. Note that flattening a document does affect your ability to reuse those entities and inclusions.

Also consider that you can still use your external (that is, outside the PTC Server) file entities or XML inclusions. If you have a good reason to keep certain data out of the PTC Server, you can still have a document object refer to a file entity or XML inclusion objects with an absolute path.

While bursting is predominately concerned with segmenting your documents, you should also consider reuse when deciding on your burst configuration. Will you ever have the occasion to reuse an entire section of a document, or even a chapter? The best candidates for reuse will often be smaller pieces of text. Warning and caution statements, copyright pages, and disclaimers all represent common examples of established text that can be used in several places. If you have an established process for these items, you may want to include them in your burst configuration. You should plan on publishing your strategy on reuse for your authors.