Distributed documents
Distributed documents are special compound application resources with typically large contents, flexible structures, and sophisticated publishing requirements. Like virtual profiles, their contents can be distributed. They are also often characterized by authoring and contribution tracking issues.

Document size and structure
Document sizes can vary greatly, from simple cards to complex interactive reference documents with thousands of pages. Processing distributed documents adds performance, flexibility, and complexity issues to the standard application resources and virtual profile processing issues.

Document publishing
Documents also introduce additional publishing issues as they are often complex and destined to publishing to various media, like interactive (ex: a web site) and print, and different layouts. Their publishing also usually involves some specific processing like generating tables of content, indexes, bibliographies, glossaries, note references, and segmenting into volumes, chapters, sections, etc, as well as navigation, especially for interactive publishing.

Document tracking and work flow
As if this was not enough, they are often produced from collaborative work and contributions that increase work flow and tracking requirements.