At my last several Engineering companies, Word was tossed out. Some years back, it basically just failed as a wordprocessor for large documents. In those days, I switched first to Lotus Office, broke that, then to Word Perfect. WP was surprisingly clumsy, but it worked very well, even allowing sub-documents, a feature I had on workstations in the mid-80s but had to give up moving to PCs.

For collaboration, that was the final standard there. For distribution, it had been Acrobat... I never want an editable document sent to people who are just supposed to read and perhaps comment on it.

More recently, my last two Engineering companies had the usual issues: most people in the company do not use Windows (a few of us hardware people do -- that's where the CAD tools are -- but for software, it's all Linux). We did the .doc-files-in-any-WP thing at the last company, but basically transitioned to Google Docs for most things. This is hardly the best wordprocessor around, but the collaboration rocks, and you don't have to teach non-engineers how to deal with .ODF or .DOC documents in Subversion.

That was already the solution at my current company, in theory, though we still have .ODF files in Subversion, and a few non-engineers sending .DOC and .DOCX files around through email chains.