For the love of Zeus, where do I begin

[rhand]

I have my first Intranet assignment. I will be putting our company operations manual on line. Please give all of the advice you can on this project.
It is running on a Unix box so no asp

[Base]

You could try if it's already digital to just copy it to frontpage and save it as a HTML page.

For advanced options, may be some one else knows...

[CiberTHuG]

Ideally, the manual should be converted to an XML format, making it a bit more universal. You an display it, transmit it, or index it in a number of methods. You can easily show it one a web server with XHTML (what will be HTML 5, I'm sure).

[Cudabean]

I like CiberTHuG's suggestion.

Base's suggestion has merit as well because it allows you to just start as simple as possible and put it straight to HTML.

If it's in HTML Converting it to XML later, if needed, would be a bit of a pain, sure, but if it's already in electronic format, you can just mark or tag up the manual's text and you're done, whereas with XML, you would still have to somehow convert it to an HTML format anyway since the current browsers do a poor job of displaying HTML. And who knows, perhaps they'll get you on to a new, more interesting project the minute you get it into HTML without you ever having to deal with it again.

Another suggestion (with a few if's.)
If it's already in electronic format
If you know what you're doing in Perl
If the electronic document is somewhat standardized

Then...
You can use perl (write a perl script) to automatically reformat the document to HTML or XML or what have you, using regular expressions (regexp's) to help you key in on various sections. I've used this technique, for example, for converting text FAQ's to HTML ones with links.

Good Luck

cudabean