Slashdot Mirror
Version Control for Documentation?
CodeNation asks: "I'm a coder in smallish (~50 staff) company with a ~20 strong development team. We, the development team, have been using CVS, and CVSWeb to manage our source base for a couple of years. In the meantime, our corporate documentation has become a complete mess. By 'corporate documentation' I mean content such as Word documents, Powerpoint presenations, and Excel spreadsheets. Anyway, I was recently asked by the one of the bosses to put a document version control system in place for this corporate documentation. All this, and the system has to be usable by the non-technical." Ask Slashdot has touched on a similar topic but it's been about 2 years since that article. Has there been any headway in this area?
"Now, this would be a trivial task if:
- The documents were text-based (i.e. the file formats weren't binary)
- The entire company understood how to use CVS
However, neither of the above are true.
I took a look at CVSWebEdit, but unfortunately it's not quite there yet in terms of stability and usability.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a possible solution? What are you currently using for document control (remember these are Microsoft Office documents). Also note that although the developement team works on Linux boxen, the non-technical staff works in a Windows environment.
Thanks for your help."
I don't think "computer illiterate" users is the issue here! MS Word docs are binary, so you can't just do a diff on successive versions. Also, DOC files use structured storage, so there is always the possibility that the contents will get rearranged within the file itself. Most CM tools treat binary files as blobs, not bothering to diff them at all. THis causes bloat in the repository (unless the files are compressed.) To successfully diff 2 Word docs, or Excel spreadsheets, or BMP or GIF files, etc, you need a diff tool that knows that particular file format.
I used to work in a big defence / aerospace company where I got in touch with Unix (SunOS). There was a wonderful text processing software : Interleaf (with Lisp Macros !), where you could get two equivalent versions of your text files : either in a binary (.doc-like) file or in a ASCII-based marked-up file (this was processable with sed or Emacs macros). an ASCII-based text file is "naturally" manageable with VCS or RCS (while a binary-file, like Word produces, is impossible to process) does anyone know what happened with InterLeaf source code ? (the beast should be portable to many open-source Unices)
Search for "Doors", a software package that is aimed at Requirements Management. (I think the company name is QSS, but I'm not sure.) Doors features a differ for Word Docs, and it either acts as a repository in its own right or a front end to a repository. Not sure what the pricing is like, but it might be worth it, just for the Doc management stuff.
I have implemented three different version control systems using three different products: Documentum, LiveLink, and DocuShare. DocuShare was by far the easiest to set up and maintain. It also required very little training for the end user and supports searching through document content. It's really a pretty slick system and it's written in Python.
Or rather, Subversion will be CVS done right, when they get it ready for public consumption.
Microsoft Visual Source Safe.
Unlike everyone else who replied to you, I'm going to say more than "SourceSafe sucks ass!"
I work at a windows shop, we use SourceSafe to store all our code (VB, C++, HTML & ASP stuff), and also documentation. For code, it's fine. (I mean, it's slow and ugly and shit, but it works fine. People who have worked there for many years say its never "eaten" anyone's file).
But we do also store Word & Excel files in there (and Access mdbs), and for that, well, it's pretty pointless. Because I'm assuming that the asker wants to be able to do more than just have the latest version available - if that was all he wanted, the files would be sitting on a fileserver and he wouldn't be asking Slashdot. If you want to be able to do diffs, see WHAT was changed in a checkin, there's no simple way to do it with binary files like Word and Excel produce. Go on, diff them with SourceSafe - "binary files differ" is all it will tell you.
There may be a solution (hell, doesn't Word store changes itself? haven't people gotten into trouble by publically releasing documents with old text "hidden" in them?) but SourceSafe isn't it.
jCVS is also a decent graphical CVS front end and based on a cursory look at CVSGui/WinCVS, it runs on far more platforms and provides a consistent interface across them (it's written in Java, so it should work on pretty much anything with a good VM and set of class libraries). I used to use it all the time on Windows and now I use it all the time on Linux, so I know it works well on at least those two platforms. I think you can also set it up as a servlet so that users can access it from a web browser.
This isn't to say that CVSGui isn't a good program, I'm just pointing out another UI option.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Used both also, but SourceSafe's only key is MS integration. Otherwise its not as featured or easy to use as CVS has been for me (speaking as a user not an admin.)
I miss the old days of not having to lock things when I check them out. Maybe our admin has it set up wrong.
~^~~^~^^~~^
I've tried to pitch CVS systems in the past, to no avail. They listened patiently and earnestly as I mentioned the same things. Then they respond "We already have that system in place, we back up daily changes on the hour and then write to DAT at night."
.hidden files.
Without the ability to take apart and regenerate a Word or Excel document from revisioned parts, thats really all you are doing is just saving every copy you ever made of a document.
Maybe its best just writing each version with a time stamp, and symlink to the current copy. Perhaps this could be done in Samba, and the time stamped files are all
BTW, if you wait a couple of months SubVersion will be out and its integration with webDav would be useful.
~^~~^~^^~~^
How do you do this? Were just manipulating HTML and ASP pages, no binary only formats to worry about.
How minor is usualy minor?
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Why not use a simple backup system that maintains a searchable database of backed-up file versions? There are some nice ones out there that do this, even one that uses an Explorer plug in to give you a view of backed up data and the ability to restore it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
However, I write all my documentation in LaTeX, using encapsulated PostScript for diagrams. This isn't a problem, because I can generate a PDF which is stored in CVS along with the text source files. I do this for software internal documentation as well as for presentation materials (slides).
Binary files are okay in CVS as long as they are derived objects rather than primary objects. What happens during a merge is that you merge the primary objects (LaTeX source files), and regenerate the derived binary object (PDF) from the primary sources and commit the results. However, when the primary objects are non-mergeable (e.g Word documents) you are in trouble. If two people modify the same Word document on separate branches, there is no way to merge other than by hand editing.
With LaTeX, the documentation can be broken into many files which are stitched together with \input directives. This was an advantage because at one point I was working in a small team on the same document. Using multiple files minimizes the amount of back and forth merging that takes place with concurrent development.
I have a few LaTeX macros which can be used to embed CVS keywords like $Id$ in a special way into the documents. The macro actually collects these into a file during latex processing. A special appendix is then added to the output which lists all of the source files and their versions. This is called the ``Bill of Materials'' and tells the reader exactly what versions of the files in CVS correspond to the hard copy.
Here is a good advocacy page you can throw at people who think that word processors are actually suitable tools for intelligent documenting: Word Processors: Inefficient and Stupid.
Are you sure these guys are programmers? I put most of a whole company on WinCVS within the last half a year or so. Looking at the /home directory of my CVS server, I see about 70 accounts belonging to users who access CVS over RSH from Windows boxes. I, along with a few others, provide minimal support besides setting up new accounts.
I've used VSS for some time, including storing of documents. For non-enterprise class stuff, it will do the job. It's not a client-server app (the VSS client directly accesses the database files via their UNC path). It can be a pain due to corruption when used over unreliable or slow links, e.g. VPNs. For a lot of things it's a cheap and usable solution.
Xanadu was made for this.
Joseph Elwell.
That's what we do where I work. We don't have non-technical people, but having those is not an excuse.
LaTeX is easy - there's windows environments for it. Even without it, a trained chimpanse should be able to write \chapter{Title} to start new chapters. For non-mathematical writing, that's about all there is to LaTeX. Maybe \textbf{bold} too, but then it's about covered. Argumenting it is too hard is going to take better arguments than "remembering a small handfull of words (so-called codes, even though they're often real words) is too hard".
And CVS ? Well, Cygwin (from sources.redhat.com) has CVS and it works beautifully. Don't tell me that writing "cvs update" is harder than locaing the correct share on a server. Just configure CVS for the non-technical people so they don't have to worry about CVSROOT.
Resolving CVS conflicts ? Anyone who's had their word document changes reversed because someone else corrected a spelling error in their document while they were working on it is going to be really encouraged to learn about conflicts. Usually though, conflicts are easy to resolve in non-code (documents).
If you have to argue against this, please make up a sane argument - saying "but people only know word" is not an argument. With this solution they don't even *have* to know word.
go here
As much as I hate to recommend a microsoft product, if all your documentation (or most of it) is being written with MS tools, then use the Tahoe document management system to store it. It is *really* good. Use the custom attributes in your documents to handle the categorisation.
We have a Part/Section number for each document which is stored in the extra attributes for each document, and the tahoe server uses it to file everything into the correct place.
It even integrates nicely with win2k. Groovy.
Why not use HTML?
Except for the fact that the HTML MS Office tools generate is huge and bloated, that's a semi-okay idea (a more okay idea would be some sort of SGML or, if you must, XML). For Word documents, you get 2-4 pages of stylesheets. And if you have a few Word line drawings in there, they won't look right at all in HTML.
If you have objects in your documents (pictures, graphs, etc.), then when Office churns them into HTML, it makes a subdirectory for all the files. If you have several sheets in an Excell spreadsheet, it also slaps the whole thing inside Javascript.
In my opinion, it's unneccessary bloat to ask everyone to do their MS Office work in HTML format.
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far... -- Le P
Since XML is a text-based meta-format, any XML document will work fairly well with CVS. Unfortunately, there aren't too many easy-to-use office apps that generate XML. (The next version of Excel is rumored to, but it doesn't look like Word will.) So you're probably better off using something like Visual Source Safe or Documentum.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Actual MSs product is crap. There is an add-on, though, called SourceOffsite, which is much, much better see http://www.sourcegear.com/
Engineering and the Ultimate
Corporate documents have much different needs than programs. Documents need to be searchable, categorized, approved, etc. You need something that will tag a document with
* Current Version
* Related Categories
* Awaiting Approvals
* Approvals Received
* Place in the system
* What time to re-review
* Notes for a document
This way, anyone can easily find a document, and find any past versions. New documents will have to go through a formal approval process, and people will be automatically notified when documents need to be re-reviewed. Notes can be attached for clarification and questions.
CVS can do versioning, but not the rest. And, CVS's versioning is MUCH too complex for what you need. You don't need branches/tags/everything else with corporate documents. You are never going to merge between branches. You just have the document and its version.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The domain wincvs.org seems to be dead, but here's a working link that appears to serve up the same content:
-Ed Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
I'm not sure WinCVS is ready for non-technical use yet. I'm having a hard enough time getting 5 Windows programmers to use it. Getting marketing to use it has got to be impossible.
Documentation folks are used to a different work-flow model. Traditionially there are copy writers, graphic artists, layout folks, and layers of editors. Their workflow is folders, or in the computer-age their representation, directories.
They're analogous models but there are differences. In writing & graphics the latest version is not always the best. Content, as you've learned, can come from many sources and in different formats. Materials are used & reused in bewildering permutations. While automaton systems exist (and are at least as sophisticated as CVSs) they require much more customization.
Frankly you're the wrong person for the job.
While you may have been great at organizing materials and workflow in your field you're now outside of it. It's a different culture (albiet possibly dysfunctionial in this case) and for you it's terra incognita. The tools are different, the processes are different, the constraints are different, the end products are different.
The best strategy would be to bring in someone knowledgable in documentation to evaluate the current staff & systems and make some suggestions, possibly implement them. If things have gotten to be "a complete mess" then there's undoubtably a number of problems and deus ex machina won't fix them.
The problem could well be poor organization. It could as well be unqualified staff, understaffing, poor management, lack of support from other parts of the company, bad technology choices, etc.
You're not really qualified to judge any of these, good as you may be in your area and in spite of the general problem-solving and management skills you might have. It's as if one of these folks were asked to come in and help shape things up when the R&D folks are late writing a release.
Indeed if it were me (and I've been invited to undertake similar projects in my career) I'd decline this "opportunity". What you're being asked to do has nothing to do with your competencies. Indeed if the only point is congruence is familiarity with CVS then the bosses would be better suited - they do more general writing and live more in the world of memos & Powerpoint slides.
You were hired to code. Presumably you're good at that. You weren't hired to analyze business processes, research & specify documentation automation systems nor to implement them. Finally, if you do this you'll be the guy for this in the future, any issues regarding it will end up on your desk from now on. Is that where you want your job to go?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, the PVCS web interface is all but unusable on Linux. But I've heard the Windows interface is reasonably nice.
While I agree with your main points, I'm a bit puzzled by this comment:
this is expressly why Windows 95 defaulted to hiding file extensions and the subdirectory trees.
I don't recall Windows 95 hiding subdirectory trees.
agreed tried the 'NEW' Visio...Lord that is terrible, they took a rgeat product and..and KILLED it :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Have a look at something like http://www.twiki.org.
People are using it now in convergences with binary document formats and reversion control. In the future it should have even better integration.
I would suggest you take a look at BSCW.
Features: web interface, users/groups, upload, drag and drop, email notifications, revisions, workspaces, delegation, etc....
I put up BSCW at a past job with a team about the same size as yours. It was okay but making sure people could get to it was the main issue. i.e. this was back when getting folks to use a web browser was a chore ;)
You can tweek it a great deal and there are drag and drop "goodies" utilities for the form upload challenged.
-Jay
http://fudge.org
As much as I dislike MS, they have a product that would probably work for you. Specifically Visual Source Safe.
Since you've stated that the droids and the techophiles don't use the same OSes, it almost makes sense for the droids to be using a MS centric VC application. It probably handles Office files natively and has a pretty interface.
On the downside, you'll pay mucho diniro for it and you'll need an NT server for it to run on (speculation on my part).
On the other hand, CVS handles binary items just fine, you just can't include RCS tags in them. If you have a nice web based wrapper, then CVS would work fine, cause you can show log items independently through the interface. Browser upload and DL would solve the checkin/out problems.
May the force be with you.
by using those options when putting them in.
For non technical data in a windows environment clClearcase works very well. We used it for a bunch of functional specs written in word. I was impressed to see that it could do diffs on word documents also. I haven't used it with other M$ documents though. Be forewarned that Clearcase is very expensive. -B
What you're missing here is the ability to browse versions via cvsweb and the like, and do visual diffs on them, which are beyond the scope of CVS seeing as they'd involve DOC- or XLS- to-HTML conversion, among other things.
This is usually why a company or organization invests in a commercial DMS like Documentum, or in a commercial source-control system, depending on how your needs skew. Doing that stuff and making it work well and quickly while still easy to use is not simple, and doing a good job of all the format conversion and parsing requires the commercial conversion filters that Inso and Adobe have owned over the years, and which are in nearly every product that does good conversions of MS Office documents.
That said, you may be able to assemble something out of the following, for example:
You also have thhe added benefit of having your stupid users send those changes to outside companies. Negotiations are a snap after that. "Hey bob, the changes say they're willing to pay through the ass for our product." "Excellent."
It's fairly easy to use, everyone can read it, and it's not editable, which in many cases is a plus.
Plus, all the change tracking in Word goes away (I won't call it version control, because it's not).
Actually, there are some nasty bugs associated with change tracking (screws up automated numbering of figures), so it's another feature of Word I never use.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I've been in your shoes, and my opinion is that it's better to keep it simple, but organized.
I don't like using CVS with nontechnical people who haven't been trrained for it. They are as likely to accidentally overwrite the new version of the doc with the old as they are to save themselves any trouble. So, if you go with CVS, definitely factor in training for everyone.
But, if that won't fly, maybe you should just consider using a plain old network directory, with some careful setup.
Basically, use grouping and network access privileges to give each workgroup their own directory noone else can edit. Each software project has their own subdirectory, and each set of docs for a version of the software a deeper subdirectory. Keep the different versions of the docs totally separate (don't try to be clever and have a shared graphics directory), and archive the old docs in zip files so that nothing gets lost or written over.
That's a start. There is a whole lot more involved in doing this job right: you have to build standardized templates, get the users to enter information for each doc (this can be done easily using a macro that makes them fill out a form when the doc is created), collect that information and set up search tools and indexes.
It's a complicated subject, and that's the short version. If you want to read more, check out my my 16-page Guide to Standardizing and Organizing Documentation. It's not quite where I want it to be yet (second draft but not finished), but I think it might be helpful.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Thats right!
All your problems can be fixed with a CVS system! You'll meet people and make friends! No useful information will ever be overwritten! Ever! Coomunications problems are a thing of the past!
Remember! If it works for coders, it can work for everyone! (Yes, that means everyone you know should be running linux as well.)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Too bad Visual Safe Source has eaten a few of my projects in the past. I wouldn't recommend using it if it can at all be avoided. And if it can't, make frequent backups.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I realize that this will be laughed away, and perhaps it should, but recently I took some time to evaluate Microsoft Sharepoint. It's meant specifically for team document management/centralization/version and includes such features as an approval cycle before a document is "published", etc. It integrated extremely well with Windows (i.e. Webfolders), though it does have a basic HTML front end as well.
Personally I wasn't sold on it. Indeed it had a slight feeling of being almost there...but not quite. Previously I believe it was codenamed "Microsoft Tahoe", and the Web Storage System (or Service can't remember), or WSS, is shared with Exchange. I'm personally curious as to whether Exchange 2000 supports the same sort of versioning, etc.
Anyways just something worth looking at if only for ideas.
Actual MSs product is crap. There is an add-on, though, called SourceOffsite, which is much, much better see http://www.sourcegear.com/
While generally I just ignore such claims on Slashdot, this just takes the cake and pushes me to respond. SourceOffsite (I use it every day so I'm pretty aware) is basically SourceSafe Lite : All the same features used in the same way, just less of them. How in the world is that so much better?
The good thing about SourceOffsite is that it does have a server component for low bandwidth connections, but without that requirement it'd be enormously stupid to use it in an office.
I feel compeled to point out Novell Groupwise.. It has docoment management capabilities... Since it inegrates with a pretty decent email/calandering/colloberation system as well. The things youve mentioned are almost definitly better for pure document management, but GW has other desirble features as well.
As for floppies/zip's, there would of course still be the ability to save files outside of the repository.
We use DocuShare (http://docushare.xerox.com/). It will provide version control for any type of file, either binary or ascii. The managers can share their Office docs, and you can put out PDF files (made from pdftex, of course).
We had to show them a few times how to do it, but they don't have any problem with the command line now. They are not completely non-technical people obviously, since they write docs for technical products !
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
other than accidental overwrites due to this "feature" when we first started using it, VSS is a usable system.
As long as everoyne synchronises with the same time-server, you are ok.
wor winnNT4/98 etc, i suggest you look into AboutTime (http://www.arachnoid.com/abouttime/) works for Win2000 too, and if you aren't running an active directory network, you will likely need to use it on your Win2000 clients
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Lotus Domino server with Dom.doc and Workflow can easily handle your requirements, a bit of Java or VB-like (lousscript) coding and you have some nice forms for cheking in/out documents. you can easily publish this system to the web also.
the wrokflow component isn't neccasary, but gives you way-cool benefits. and its easy to build workflows...
of course, if you live out here on the West Coast, you probably think that Lotus makes mail server software. you would be wrong, but that's the prevailing perception out here.
check it out, its easy to develop with, and very extensible.
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a bit drops in
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a bit drops in
Sound of ascii
We put EVERYTHING into the VOB (Versioned Object Base, what CC keeps stuff in). Text files (e.g. source), FrameMaker documents (our documentation is generally written in Frame), etc.
The Windows tool for CC is called Attache. It sucks copiously. But if you say to an office type these magic words:
- they become instant converts to version control, and are willing to slog through any horrible tool to gain its benefits ;-)
We happily throw binary documents (photos, FrameMaker docs, Word docs, whatever) into the VOBs as well. Takes up disk space (that's expensive backed-up and maintained disk space, not cheap raw disk space), but the benefits are UTTERLY UTTERLY worth it.
If you have trouble convincing the Points That Be, try the above sentence and see if they shudder at the thought. If they do, you've got 'em.
As for tools ... even a crappy Windows tool for CVS access is fine if it fundamentally works. They really will use a crappy tool if they can get version control for themselves as well.
You might even get them to cough up for more sophisticated commercial version control systems. CVS does the job, but I for one don't like the idea of going back to it from ClearCase, pricey as CC is.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Alexandria, which says it is "a CVS/Javadoc/Source code/Documentation management system meant for use within Open Source projects. It's goal is to create a global documentation and source organization system to help people understand source code and to share code across projects."
"It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit."
Friend of mine and I thought this one up to get around this problem. What you do is have them save to a specific volume on the network. However, Every time you do things to the directories, it triggers scripts. This is almost a no-brainer on macos with folder actions in applescript, and I suppose you could to the same with VBS as well.
.doc to RTF, .XLS to tab seperated...this way the eloi can use .doc...but you're still using text formats you can use with cvs.
So when they Mount the networked volume, what really happens is a script does a cvs checkout for them, then they see the mounted drive locally. Then they save, folder action converts
You can do a commit after that, or when they unmount the volume...a script does a checkin/commit. Season to taste.
So that's it....basically, you use scripts to abstract the user from CVS. The happy beneifit is by using text formats...you clean all the macro virii out of your data.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
The third option is to try PVCS which is another form of CVS / SourceSafe, but made by a diffeerent company. It has a GUI just like SourceSafe and handles binaries.
We just use a fileserver and people edit from there. You can set up word docs to keep track of who did what edits and change colors. There is an option in it as well.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The big problem is whether you can get a file type manager for excel, word, etc. files. Without support in ClearCASE for those file formats, you can't do diffs in ClearCASE, and you don't have compressed version storage. So you might as well just have a WORM file server somewhere that everybody tosses their documents onto, storing every complete version of every file.
Although, ClearCASE has gotten a lot more integrated with Windows, so it might have a type manager by now or perhaps Microsoft provides one. I can vouch that ClearCASE on Unix is very robust, powerful, and secure if you're willing to put in the administration time.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I know its not open-source, but we use DocuShare, a Xerox product, for document management. It's not designed for "code management", it's designed for document management. Check it out (I don't have a URL handy, but it shouldn't be hard to find.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
We use ClearCase (a great source code control system, in my mind) at my company, but for your purposes, ClearCase would be too much. Running ClearCase and general source code control is pretty much a full time job. Would be way too much for your needs (given company size)
What exactly would this solve? You can store binary files in CVS just fine. And deltas between uuencoded binary files would be completely useless.
All they have to do is continue to use CVS and educate the new users.
There are several possible solutions to this problem, as I see it. If you want to go the commercial route, Visual Source Safe is the normal standby, or any other commercial source code repository systems would work. VSS has poor merging capabilities, but when you're dealing with Word files or PowerPoint slides, that's not so much a problem (as Office can "version" the files for you -- though make sure to strip the file before releasing it to customers). Also, the upcoming Office XP has Sharepoint capabilities, and is very easy to use (easy enough for your pointy-haired boss to figure out, even).
On the other hand, you could setup CVS anyway, even though you said you'd rather not. There are a few nice win32 GUIs for CVS, so the end-user experience shouldn't be too bad. On top of that, if you use CVS for your documentation, you can keep that in your source tree. One less tree to manage, and you'll always know where the documentation is. And CVS can handle binary files just fine. Just don't expect to be able to merge changes.
Of course, another (less likely) option would be to move all your documents to HTML, or XML with a set of defined XSLs to transform them. That way, you could do merging just fine. However, that's most likely not a workable solution if you deal with anything but Word documents (since word can save to HTML instead of .doc).
Look at it if you will, but we haven't liked it.
It's actually kind of complicated for non-technical types (as opposed to lightly technical types which can usually grok it). I found it silly that we had to have *classes* for most people to use it, and yes, it's very much geared toward building websites, use of the browser and it has a cumbersome workspace and locking scheme. My company uses teamsite, my group tried it for a while, didn't like it, and went to CVS + Apache + cron.
demi
I really really like Star Team. As a base source control application it does a fine job on deltas. The database options for back end storage aren't too bad. I like way it ties defect handling to parts of the application to users. If you're using the native GUI it will notify you when you've been assigned a bug to fix, or if you're the tester, when the bug has been fix and its time to verify.
// EvilJohn
// Java Geek
Don't overlook this tool. Its a comphrensive source control, defect and feature request management system.
One thing it is missing though, is a native linux client.
Less Talk, More Beer.
[Plug]
I briefly worked for a company in New Zealand called SilentOne on their eponymous KM product. Not only were those kiwis awesome to work with, their product was very cool. While it ran on Windows only, it was a very good solution when compared with some of the others out there (such as FileNet and Lotus/Domino).
Obviously, by using Linux, this product isn't useful to you, but I found it very intuitive, and it's integration into the Office toolbar very helpful (just like the CVS commands built into XEmacs). It had a web-interface which could embed Office apps into it, as well as the interface within office.
I'd reccomend it to anyone here stuck with a Windows-only shop (and boy, there are way too many of those...)
[end plug]
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
There are a number of good tools out there for version control - however there are very few that can handle binary files in a "good" manner.
Some issues:
One - Binary file formats - such as MS Word - cannot have diffs run on them that are meaningful - a binary diff will result in a file larger than the two original files. So most version control programs will store binary files as seperate versions - but will NOT show the differences between the versions.
Two - Microsoft HAS some built in support for versions within Word - however this will quickly result in VERY large files - which get increasingly less useable. Also note, that this will be ONE file containing all versions - if you "version" this file, you will have TWO files with different sets of the underlying versions.. sounds confusing? It would be.
Three - There ARE version control programs that have worked with Microsoft to learn how to understand the underlying MS file formats (I believe Clearcase may, possibly MS's own Sourcesafe (which is otherwise a dangerous version control software to use since it can have data integrity problems) and possibly a few others.
So - what would I recommend or suggest?
First - Look carefully at WHAT you are intending to version. Is it a collection of documents (i.e. a full manual)? Individual documents that change over time? A whole project structure (say a website for online help?) Or something else?
Can you seperate out the FORMATING (which might be in MS Word) from the content? For example by using a Master document format - importing TEXT documents into MS Word? This would allow great flexibility in versioning the underlying text documents, keep a smaller MS Word file, and that file could be "versioned" storing copies of each successive version?
Second - For simple document management systems, (which run on Linux but can be accessed by any browser) look at a system like InfoPlace - simple, open source (I think) and easy to use. It is however not a rigorous version control system, but a partial version control system.
Hope this is helpful - I spent 2+ years teaching and managing version control for a very large development operation (1000+ developers worldwide).
Shannon
-- Join us in Chicago May 1-4th for MeshForum -- writer, historian, tech geek, entrepreneur, internet junky since '91 --
There are GUIs for CVS for many operating systems (including Windows and MacOS) at cvsgui.org.
Non-technical people can be teached how to use 'add', 'update' and 'commit' in 15 minutes, at least it has worked in my company. (They use WinCVS for exchanging Excel documents with external clients and are happy with it.)
Computers. You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Just as another voice (and remember that these stories aren't statistics), I also know of a VB shop (a very talented one that took good jobs within the scope of VB and delivered good apps, so I assume they knew what they were doing) that had their VSS bit the big one. When they restored from backup, it did it again. And again. Something had broken deep inside and caused a logic bomb that always eventally exploded. They eventually checked *everything* out of an old version, killed the system and rebuilt, but it cost the entire company (all sales documents, templates for various company functions, etc. were in there) a couple of weeks, and got them some upset clients.
But, otoh, they are still using it...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Xerox DocuShare
Check out Domino.doc, which is a super-enterprise-grade document collaboration platform that does versioning, archiving, searching, approval and workflow, etc. Not sure if it runs on Linux, but the core of Domino certainly does.
And, yes, I know that nobody wants to admit it, but this is really the area where the MS Exchange + Office platform excels (ooh, accidental pun). Where Lotus needs an add-on (.DOC), much of this searching/versioning is built into the core MS software. Of course, then you have to start administering an NT server... --JRZ
sourceoffsite is just another client for MS SourceSafe that works over IP. It`s for offsite access to your sourcesafe databases using tcp/ip and encryption. You still need a SourceSafe server as the engine. So it`s not "much, much better", it`s the same.
---------- ovidius naso
There are plenty of web interfaces for CVS. We switched from PVCS to CVS where I work a year and a half ago, and people still thank me for getting rid of PVCS. The big problem with documentation is binary files don't version control very well with any software. A good solution would be an easy to use word processor that save's in xml and can be converted to HTML, Word, etc... I don't know anything like that that's easy to use. Lyx is the closest thing I've found, but it's a long way away. I once started to look into Adobe Framemaker for this purpose, but didn't bother because it's way too expensive.
You guys should use the document management system that my last company used- total chaos. Every user creates a directory called "Bob's stuff" or "BSR" or something similar. Then all of the files they work on, no matter who else will need them, should go in the "Bob's Stuff" directory. Each file should be given completely incomprehesible names like "ClientData.xls", "JimQuote.doc", or "CSIQ12001rpg.ppt". That way when you need something, all you need to do is find the person who worked on it first and have them remember what they called the file. The set up and maintnence costs of this system are nearly nill. All you need for it to work are employees with photographic memories who never quit or die.
-B
If you'd love to check it out, but the links on cvshome.org point to wincvs.org for TortoiseCVS, and that domain, according to NSI whois: Record expires on 08-Mar-2001. So try this link instead, it works!
John 17:20
what does sourcesafe buy you that cvs doesn't? last i checked (which could have been a version ago at this point), sourcesafe did the exact same thing with binaries (word documents) that cvs did.
http://www.microsoft.com/catalog/display.asp?subid =22&site=10858&x=30&y=11
...it has version control and publishing for all kinds of documents.
It's MS-only, which sort of sucks, but it's great for those that only know how to use the "power point compiler".
Greenstone
"Greenstone is a complete digital library creation, management, and distribution package for Unix or Windows. Users create collections by gathering a set of input documents, specifying a configuration file, and running the build script. It provides full-text and fielded searching, browsable indexes, customised formatting, metadata extraction (acronyms, languages, etc), a Z39.50 client, and many other features. It supports many input formats, the interface is configurable and multi-lingual, and collections can be distributed on the web or on CD-ROM."
for document management - it's okay for that purpose, but quite inflexible for document sharing on an intranet. I've found myself frustrated with this inflexibility quite often. (e.g. you can't easily have a user-friendly index.html pointing to the documents you want to share in a directory). Haven't tried the version control feature.
I think it's great for document sharing on the intranet. Sometimes it might be hard to find documents that you're looking for, but there is a built in search engine. If the intranet is organized it shouldn't be that hard.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Sorry for the shameless plug (I work for Open Text Corporation), but Livelink is a great document management system product. It may be out of your price range, but it does allow you to have versioning on your documents, and it has a whole whack of other features that many enterprises demand.
It seems that they're marketing it now as "a highly scalable and comprehensive collaborative environment for the development of Web-based intranets, extranets and e-business applications." Oh dear.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Actually in my experience, they don't use outside vendors for source control. We used SLM (pronounced slime). It's like RCS in that it locks the file tree to do work- so it doesn't allow checkouts during a checkin. This is high quality circa 93 technology :-) But it was developed in house, so it is (was?) all good.
This probably varies by group though.
I've been using CVS for a while, but it really doesn't cut it for the kind of document management that they can do. Throw them an email and see what falls out.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
I helped them institute CVS using WinCVS as a front end GUI. When dealing with Word docs, etc, it was impossible to view diffs between different versions, but thats the way it was with SourceSafe as well.
I wrote a small document and some tcl scripts to help people. You can find them at my site.
Something that I have seen work reasonably well is using CVSweb and designating only one or a few people who are allowed to submit files to CVS.
This allows everyone to download the versioned documents with a minimum of fuss while making it very hard to screw up CVS. The basic mode of operation is that writers who want to change an existing piece download it from CVSweb, edit it and them send it to the CVS person to commit it.
You can run into a bit of trouble if multiple people check out documents for editing simultainously, but in a shop with 50 people that shouldn't happen too often and you require them to submit changes quickly.
Version control systems do a lot more that saving multiple copies of the file.
The VMS filesystem's ability to store multiple versions of files basically had the same function as the automatic "make a backup copy" capability in many text editors and word processors; it let you roll back mistakes. But you were expected to evenutally purge the old versions to keep from filling up the disk.
(You say they're calling it 'ACMS' now? Back when I was using it regularly, in '87-'93, it was just called 'CMS'.)
As a developer, I usually prefer CVS, but StarTeam works quite well for a whole office, Word docs and all. For the Windows-based world you mention, it seems quite appropriate. They have many different clients, and I've seen it used in mixed Windows & Solaris & Linux environments.
In general, if a shop can't use CVS, and especially if they're using SourceSafe, I can in good conscience recommend it. And remember, friends don't let friends use SourceSafe :-)
IANAL, YMMV, etc. I'm not sure if it will work for you, but it's definitely worth investigating
I searched, but no-one else seems to have suggested this. Use a wiki. I recommend MoinMoin.
It is usable by non-technical users (a *lot* simpler than MS Word, certainly), and keeps a complete revision history, and can show diffs. Can be installed on NT with IIS5 with full functionality.
The down side is converting existing documentation to use it, although most solutions to your problem will involve that to some degree.
-Spiv.
It works fine to not lock files if you can merge the (usually minor) overlap later, but in the case of say word documents, being binary, you can't really merge changes (easily) and thus locking is neccesary.
Because one of the specific problems CodeNation mentioned is that the files were binary.
He said ... This would be a trivial task if... The documents were text-based (i.e. the file formats weren't binary)
I merely offered a solution to that part, to go along with the frontend idea, since the frontend could automate that translation, as well.
You don't have to jump on me for offering an idea that specifically solves one of the problems mentioned.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
True... and the problem with the files being binary can be solved by UUencoding them, first.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Well, I'm not a Microsoft coder, nor do I know how much work you're willing to put into the solution versus cost of an out-of-the-box solution, but, here's what i'd do.
.doc or powerpoint presentation file is uploaded, extract the text into an ascii file, and "secretly" upload a related file with the plaintext. Then, make diffs actually diff between the two ascii files, not the docs. Maybe even add support for an "advanced doc diff" where you load both docs into Word and compare them (i'm pretty sure MS Word still has support for this).
Whip up a nice limited frontend in Visual Basic that makes commits and checkouts easy. When any
Excel or whatever other files could have summery information written into their text file, as it'd be hard to make something meaningful out of the diff from a spreadsheet otherwise.
Maybe that's a bit more than you're looking to do, but that's what would seem the best long-term solution to me.
-ben.c
Disclaimer: In case you missed it, I work there.
Even better link: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=10072&release_id=24897
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
If you want to avoid feeding the M(assive) S(hark), you can build on top of CVS. Set up a web page for uploading to a document directory, and have a server-side daemon grab files that appear in the directory and shove them into CVS. However, there is more to version control than just storing multiple versions of a document, and even CVS doesn't do too well on non-text docs, like you mentioned.
I suggest you take a look at SubVersion, written by (among others) the guy who developed CVS. The alpha is due out on (or shortly after) the 15th of this month. The intent of SubVersion is to be everything that CVS was, plus most of what it wasn't. SubVersion, among other things, versions file meta-data (including directories), and allows for file renames. Apropos to your question, SubVersion allows for client-side diff plugins, so that it can intelligently and efficiently store revision differences. Also apropos to the question, SubVersion supports WebDav... you can't get much more user-friendly than that.
That I recall Office 2000 having some kind of a version control system in place. I remember at least one case (wasn't it Excite@Home?) got themselves in trouble because they left a .doc up on the web that had all the previous changes in it, so you could read all the internal snide remarks about the consumers. Oops. ;)
I was wrong - after two seconds of searching, it wasn't Excite, it was Alcatel and their handing of the default DSL modem password issue (Slashdot story). While I can't find a link to the document (CPE_statement.doc) online, I'm looking at it right now with all the highlights and strike-throughs. Very funny stuff.
http://www.eroom.com
----
You might want to take a look at OpenCMS. http://www.opencms.com
Document Manager is a document management system with the ability to check-in/check-out documents, track changes, and support multiple users. It supports all usual operations (rename, delete, view, edit) and comes with optional support for a secure HTTP server.
Yes, I know it's CVS implemented all over again, but it's very good solution for cooperative team work (it doesn't support ACLs right now).
There are two separate issues in your question.
I ran into the same problem a few years ago for documents produced by various word processors. I was the tech lead (translate: responsability without the pay) of a small team. We had documents coming from a variety of sources, and we were using RCS, which is the underlying mechanism for CVS, rather than CVS per se.
When we had a "foreign" document landing in our e-mail, our solution for keeping track of it was to imbed an RCS identification string ("$Id$") in that document. Some document format supported comment (invisible) fields, which was nice. Otherwise, we had to use some "invisible" string, such as a 1-pt header on a page. That worked for RTF documents as well as some weird formats such as Quark XPress, and even a PostScript file from the guy doing the cover of the manual on a Mac. That's because these formats are basically text.
Thing are more complicated when you get binary formats such as some MS Office native format docs. Assume you cannot reject the doc and require an RTF version (that is covered by the previous case). Then you need to set up a script that converts the binary document into Base64, slaps an $Id$ field in it and check it into your repository. Conversely, a check out requires you to remove the Id line and convert the Base64-encoded text file back into binary. I'd gladly cut-and-paste the 10-line Ksh code, but our lawyers want us to go through our "open-sourcing software committee" first. :-) You can automate the
process within the CVS server.
I had to teach my team to use RCS. Since then, cool GUI programs appeared, such as WinCVS (Check http://sourceforge.net/projects/cvsgui/. The site www.wincvs.org wasn't responding when I wrote this.) This is a GUI program that allows even an accountant to use a CVS server with a minimum of hand-holding. Give it a try.
Good luck.
- - SysKoll
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
CVS done right.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
so is there a cvsfs project?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Come to Dallas. Contract. Charge an arm and a leg. I assume it also works in New York and Silicon Valley (only more so), but the cost of living is low here.
The ease of use issue need not be a big problem. You can throw together some quick VBA code to modify how MS Word opens and closes documents, to handle transparent checkin and checkout operations. The same is true for Excel, and (I believe) PowerPoint. Using the same technique, you could also switch the default file format to RTF for word. Thus the documentation folks would not even be aware of the versioning, unless they attempted to open a locked file.
RTF can easily be handled by CVS, so there would be no problem there. If I remember correctly, Word supports embeddable data fields, and this can be used to synchronize document versions with software versions, as well as handling the various scheduling and life-cycle data that the docs folks need. For Excel, this data can be stored in standardized grid locations that are outside the displayed or printed boundaries defined. I don't know about PowerPoint.
If the docs department has not already done so, they would have to make use of "master documents" to control the full publication, so each writer, illustrator, etc., is working with a relatively small file that covers no more than one chapter or section of a document. This is the only way that file locking will work successfully.
One person in the docs department would have to learn WinCVS, or some other GUI front-end, to be able to resolve the occasional problem (or they can just contact your CVS person). There would also have to be a few standards imposed, such as closing a file when leaving for the day. But these are very easy to implement. You could even use VBA to force a save and file close after x hours of inactivity and generate a message or email to the docs writer to explain what happened.
I strongly advise against using a separate version control system for software devel and tech docs, since this would only complicate coordinating the right software versions with the corresponding tech docs versions. If you make it transparent, then each tech docs professional is doing things the way that they know how, but the underlying mechanism is doing what needs to be done to implement proper version control, and synchronization with software versions.
If your company is on a tight budget, this is the way to go. Not only can you resolve your problems with a minimum of expenditure (a day or two of programming time), but you can also sell your VBA code to other companies with the same problem (or to one of the companies that specializes in such things), or donate it to become part of the CVS repertoire.
My work's document control is very simple and effective. Store all the documents in one Windows directory (perhaps with subdirs for various types of document).
Other machines on the network can read and write via SMB, but Windows makes sure that only one person can have it open for write access at a time (so there is no problem with multiple saves).
Now, the important bit: Label each document with its version in the filename, and whenever you make *any* change, give it a new version number and save it. In the file (near the top) , set aside a section for change history. Anyone who edits the document puts an entry in this section saying their name, the date, the version #, and what change they made.
Needless to say, this directory should be backed up reguarly and safely.
The main difference I see in a document versioning system as opposed to a code centric-versioning system is in tracking changes / merging. Much harder to merge doc's of different versions than code, I would think.
MSOffice has some features like that, but I do not think they are primetime. Different contributions / changes get colored differently, until you have what looks like a technicolor taco platter on your screen where once there was a document.
I think you just want a tree that does source control / check out / check in stuff. Sort of like clearcase with out merges. That would be really useful, I am sure it has to be written out there somewhere.
This much I know: Tracking documents is time consuming. Tracking changes is difficult as well, though if there is a skilled staff, hopefully this is less important. I have used the MSOffice functions that do this, they are a kludge.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Microsoft is about to release their own document management software SharePoint Portal Server (codename Tahoe). It's mainly known for its searching capabilities but its other features include integration into Microsoft Office, version control, and the ability to check in/out documents.
I've tried it under Linux, but it still seemed a little buggy. However, it does have potential to be used within the business context (especially with cvs/diffing)
--Robert
I work for a large networking company and we are currently moving all of our documentation out of proprietary Frame and Word to XML.
The sooner you get away from proprietary binary file formats the better, especially if your company is growing.
There are a couple great XML editors out there (Arbortext's Epic and Softquad's XMetal), and the both interface with Documentum, Xyvision, Oracle (their iFS component is XML aware and does version control), plus a crapload of other tools. Epic also can convert from Word to XML.
Of course the leap into the XML-nether is not an easy one, and requires a *lot* of time, effot and $$ before you see results, but in the long run it works. Plus, once you have everyting in XML you arent tied to any evil tool vendors like M$ who update their file formats every few years.
At least look into an XML solution before you decide to shell out a lot of time and effort on trying to manage a bunch of Word documents...
--
Wasn't the DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol designed for uses such as this????
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
Hi.
IMHO Microsoft Word is not suitable for technical documentation. Firstly, it's full of bugs, annoyingly slow, an contain a lot of unpredictable features.
During our last year, we're working on our main engineering projefct CHESS MCAP. We decided early to use Adobe Framemaker as our documentation tool, and is very happy about it. Framemaker 6 has the posibility to store documents in XML format, which makes it possible to use version control like CVS. (Which we use). There's also an extended version of framemaker; +SGML were you have the capability to base your documents on DTD's, like Docbook etc.
deltree "c:\program files\microsoft office" now!
--larsw
A couple years ago, we put forth a huge project to create an FDA-compliant document control system. We called it DCMS (document control management system). It was a strictly internal project, but I was the main developer and one day wanted to make a GPL'd version for the public.
Among the features: search criteria for many attributes, including indexed text-lookups (by using the unix "strings" tool). There were two modes.. One was "browser-mode", who could only search for "released" versions of documentation and click on a link to download the document. The other was "editor-mode", which required a secured login. From here you could browse any version: draft, approved and or released. At which point, you could "check-out" a document, which would lock it under your name and save a copy in your work-space, which is on a samba/nfs-exported directory (Your X drive in windows). It was su'd to your name so that only you could edit it. Documents were categorized into classes, subclasses, and document-types (product/project/quality.. Then product-name, project-number. And finally, doc-type which was technical spec (TS), functional spec (FS), requirements (RQ), etc..). Each document was given an auto-incrementing document number for unique identification.. So a document name was "DCMS_FS_00079.doc". Managers controled the doc-categories and creation of new documents.. It became a full time position, but FDA requirements are pretty strict.
When you were all done, you used the web to check it back in, which created a new daft version and allowed others to check it out.
authors would submit requests for review of documentation to manager-users, who would ultimately "approve" and later "release" a given version (making it available for public viewing).
Our first version used "clear-case" as the version control (which allowed direct URL-links to files, instead of explicit extraction from RCS), and as the meta-data storage repository (since it had it's own searching engines). We made heavy use of Perl and at the time Netscape-server.
I was in the process of rev-2.0 which would use Apache, Perl, RCS and MySQL and ideally be open-sourced, but our company took a major turn which seized all projects. However, DCMS is still fully running today (under different management), and aside from the performance issues of the clear-case dependencies, works great.
If I had the time, and if I were to do it today, I'd use postgres (for roll-back support), flat files (no real point to RCS if you let the DB do everything), Apache and maybe something like zope with python (though I'm still partial to perl).
-Michael
-Michael
Please avoid anything from Xerox. Docushare is the biggest joke running in DMS systems. And, the company is doing so well.....
I thought I had made peace with the FreeBSD users' group after all these years. Now you tell me that I have to start the flame war anew. You must be one of those twisted vi and tcsh users!
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Check out the products available from Hummingbird, Documentum, and Eastman. A long list of document management vendors lives here.
---
The Big News Page
For anyone looking to start an open source project, here is a product I would love to have. This isn't so much about managing a bunch of documents as wanting software to manage one really complex document.
.not. fixed).
I write a lot of functional specifications and technical specifications. The main problem with traditional methods for doing this is that most software doesn't handle new additions, multiple versions or variations as well as I'd like. For example, say I have a spec with an outline like so:
1. Introduction
2. Administration Features
2.1 Create users
2.2 Create groups
All easy enough in, say, Word. Now, say in section 1 I have a link to section 2.2. Because I want the link to be legible in a printed version, the link would contain the number of the section (e.g. "2.2"). All well and good. Word can do this.
But, suppose my software has been released, and now we are updating the spec with new features. I add a section before the old section 2. Word, being fairly good at outlining, correctly renumbers the sections, like so:
1. Introduction
2. New Feature
3. Administration Features
3.1 Create users
3.2 Create groups
Here is one problem: My link in section one still says "2.2", even though it links properly to the new 3.2 section. I have to manually update the label of the link.
Another issue: I'd like to output different versions of the specification. Sometimes, for example, we need to show the spec to a customer, but don't want to show certain particular sections. Maybe a given section, for example, was implemented specially for customer X, and customer Y is a direct competitor who should not see the section for legal reasons. Using Word, I now have to manually remove the section and renumber the links yet again.
Another issue: The structure of a functional specification is often identical to the technical specification for the same product, but the contents of each section are very different. It would be nice to only manage the structure (i.e. the outline) once, and have that carry into both the functional spec and the technical spec (and the test plans, online help and so on). Another way to look at this idea is to think of different languages. I'd like to be able to manage the outline for the English version, and have those changes carry over into the Spanish version.
Another issue: I'd like to be able to switch a set of screen shots with another set. For example, maybe I have a set in English and a set in Spanish, and want to switch them wholesale. Or, perhaps, my screens are skinned, and I want to show some clients one skin and others another.
Oh, yes, and I'd like to be able to have multiple people working on the same spec at one time.
So, my ideal product would treat each section of the spec as a record in a centralized database. Each record would have user defined fields. The fields could be images, rich text, whatever. Each field would have a robust rich text editor. Links could be embedded into the text of rich text fields. The link would hold a reference to another record and a style describing what the label of the link is in terms of its section number (which is
A screen on the product would manage how the records link together (that is which are the children of others, and so on.)
Another screen would manage the base font styles of the "levels" of the records (i.e. all of the x.y headers in one style, the x.y.z headers in another).
Then, on another screen, you could select all of the sections you wanted, the fields from each record you wanted, the art set you wanted and the styles you wanted, and then render the selected items to a particular format. The software would organize the selected sections into the proper outline, then change the link labels to the proper section numbers. It could then output to PDF, HTML, XML, whatever.
One key feature is the selection of fields for this rendering process. For example, maybe my fields are: EnglishIntro, ScreenShot, EnglishFuncDesc, EnglishTechDesc, SpanishIntro, SpanishFuncDesc, EnglishTestPlan. Then, if I wanted an English technical specification, I'd choose to output the EnglishIntro, ScreenShot, and EnglishTechDesc, choosing the English artwork set. If I wanted a Spanish functional spec, I'd choose SpanishIntro, ScreenShot, and SpanishFuncDesc and the Spanish artwork set. For a test plan in English without graphics at all, choose EnglishTestPlan.
There are more complications, but this would very much improve my day.
It costs plenty of money, but my company is using eRoom and it works beautifully. YOu can link documents (word documents etc. ARE searchable) with discussions, polls, mini-DBs, etc. It's a great groupware/collaboration tool that is not as difficult to use as notes, but has an interface that anyone can deal with (web-based).
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
Two possibilities.
Since all of your stuff is M$ office stuff, use Exchange server. It will keep track of who made edits to files, when they made the edits, and will only allow one user to make edits at a time. Combine that with or have that indepent of SourceSafe and as long as you backup your environment with regularity, you're golden.
We use both without our company (yea, small dev firm that uses microsoft products), but they work well and we have yet to have any problems.
I see that people on this thread have claimed that SouceSafe has "eaten" some of their documents... can you honestly believe the word of someone that uses the technical term of a file being "eaten"?
I work for a shop in a similar situation and we use Clearcase. It's not free (especiall not as in beer), but it's hard to beat for features and flexibility. Plus we can run a multiplatform system (Unix server, Unix X and shell clients or Windows cmd or gui clients - web clients also an option). So it keeps both the techies and the non-techies happy.
Clearcase does, as of version 4.1 have MS Word support.
We use Documentum. www.documentum.com
Though this may be overkill for you as it is complete content management not just version control. Also it is expensive.
-Mark
CVS should give you most of what you want. ,v file so they might get big with lots of
The only thing that CVS will not do for you
is diffs but I'm sure there are other programs
that will do diffs for Word, Excel, etc.
CVS doesn't mind binary files if you add them
with the -kb flag. The only thing to remember is
that CVS will store a copy of each version in
the
revisions.
We use WinCvs wincvs.[com|org] for our
non-technical users and they seem like it.
I also think there is an explorer plugin
that lets you perform CVS operation from the
explorer popup menu.
--
CVS Rules
-- ZeroZenith
I don't recall Windows 95 hiding subdirectory trees.
The default settings for Win95 (and Win98 and WinNT4 and Win2K): opening a folder will open a new window showing that folder's contents, or replace current window's contents with that folder's contents. You have to select "explore" instead of "open" on a context menu to see the tree pane. You can tweak the file type settings to default to 'explore'.
[
Maybe I'm cynical but your stated goals of
implementing version control and
making it usable by nontechnical people
You face one major uphill battle.
Many nontechnical people have a hard time understanding a hierarchy, or of file types; this is expressly why Windows 95 defaulted to hiding file extensions and the subdirectory trees.
Add to that the complexity of "where in the hierarchy does this file permanently belong," and the question "at what point in time was the file in a condition you liked?," you get into a major learning curve. Describing a sandbox is a task unto itself. Undisciplined developers often grok CVS but still don't use the delta comments in any meaningful way.
That said, VMS is probably your ideal here for simplifying version management. Too bad it was an integration into the filesystem itself, and didn't expressly deal with multiple writers or delta comments.
For those who haven't used VMS, the filename included a version number: name.extension;version . If you neglected to mention the version number in a system call, it assumed the newest. Every file opened for writing got the next version number and left the old versions untouched; every file opened for read-write cloned the newest old version first and bumped its version number. This builds into a large list of ;1 ;2 ;3 ;4 ;5 ... ;632 version for each file. You could easily back them all up, or prune to the newest version.
[
Flash as a replacement for powerpoint. You're defenitely not an office worker. It probably has been 20 years since you last saw one :-)
It's all very nice to drop TLAs such as 'CVS' in to conversations and hope for a response, but why not look at what already exists.
Word '97 added a feature whereby you could 'save [a] version' of a document so that the document contained multiple copies of itself. You could then go back and look at earlier revisions (within the same file) and run diffs.
So stop the buzzword-whoring and ask Clippy how to use the features that already exist.
-1; Cranky
When you get a diff from two text files, you can look through it and see what's different by hand. This is a meaninful diff.
If you have a diff in two MS word documents, will you be able to tell that the only change is an italics tag and a left-centering? Probably not, or at least not without opening BOTH, and looking them over for changes.
Yeah.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
The main problem will be getting people who
modify the documents to actually use the VC
you set up, I expect.
Basic features are:
Search Engine
Subscriptions
Categories
Document Versioning
Collaboration
IFilter support (to support more that Office docs)
There's a trial version available to test it out.
ÕÕ
ÕÕ
Microsoft doesn't even use Visual SourceSafe internally. It can't handle large projects. They actually use Rational ClearCase for the majority of their Source Control.
Doesn't say alot for the product.
The other thing is SourceSafe has problems with more than 200 projects in its repository. It starts Corrupting the data. Not what you want to see from a source Control system.
----
Just remove the spaces and do the intelligent thing to email me.
----
Just remove the spaces and do the intelligent thing to email me.
...several commercial solutions for something like this. If you want to save money, you should train your people on CVS. If you can affor it, you might want to look at Documentum or another document management system. Those systems are a bit less intimidating than version control tools targeted toward developers.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
However, the inability to learn new things is most certainly a sign of stupidity
Non-technical people should have a very limited technical requirement to do their job, just as a technical person should have a very limited marketing requirement to do their job. I am not forgiving all stupidity by non-technical people, obviously that is rampant (I've worked in IT support, so I share your frustration). But I do know that it is the proper job of IT to make the systems as simple as possible so that the non-technical people can do their jobs without too much complexity or inefficiency.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
The day appears to be coming. Project-M is a document system that uses an XML file format and a database backend to store the document data. Content is then fully searchable, with a version control concept built-in! And I suppose anybody can write their own front end to manipulate the documents. Project-M kicks ass, but it's still vaporware of sorts and looks like it'll be expensive. Conglomerate looks like it'll be an open source alternative with much the same functionality - though maybe not as sophisticated.
Either way, the future of documentation needs to be XML-centric/server centric to really offer productivity gains for work groups in a corporate (and maybe even non-corporate) environment.
Domino.doc from Lotus does everything you want and more.
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
Documentum is a product that you hear a lot about. We use a product called Worldview from a company called Interleaf. It runs on Unix and we use Oracle as our backend repository. Users can check documents in using a word processor and an application called RDM. (RDM is the loading component, Worldview is the document viewer.)
I don't understand why you don't just standardize on Rich Text Format...
.doc to .rtf
.xls. Anyone know of one?
In my company, I'm working on converting over from
Our Letter Art dept already uses rtf with DocuRight to work with our large laser printers.
This will also ease transition to a linux based word processor.
The only problem I've seen, is that there isn't an open format to replace
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
I work for a automobile insurance company, and this was a problem when I first started working here.
All I had them do was, on every scrap of work they create electronically, put a form ID on it, and use it in the file name itself. The method we use is:
XXXXXXXX-010511
Unique ID and then date.
Why doesn't this work?
-Jess
The system also has an easy to use web interface for those times when you cannot access it via the client.
We geared the development of this system towards non-technically saavy users and it lacks many of the more complicated features of CVS, but it has all the features that you are looking for. (Check in/ check out/ view old versions etc..).
I can let you try a beta version right now if you are really interested!
Contact me at and65@mail.com.
1) An idiot won't be able to use it properly
2) Having the technology available will only make them seem (and probably feel) stupider
First of all Word and Excel aren't that easy to learn. You can type up and save a document no problem, but learning how to do precise formatting tasks is something that takes good doc people a long time to learn how to do properly. Furthermore, doc people have to understand the thing they're documenting, which is not that much easier than writing the code in the first place, for lots of projects. Thus it's a fallacy that doc people aren't technical enough to learn good version control.
Secondly, CVS is pretty easy to learn. 99% of working with CVS is two commands: cvs update and cvs commit. Even assuming you don't go with one of the many adequate-to-kickass gui clients for CVS (my fave: TkCVS, maybe even in Windows), your learning curve for what most of the doc people have to know is pretty low. You can send 5% of the team to a class or buy them a book, there are ALWAYS people who want to know just a little bit more about the system they work with, and those people can be the gurus for the rest, who really just want to write doc.
Finally, if you try to implement version control without SOME education about what's going on behind the scenes, you will have lots of minor tragedies. Version control isn't perfect, and you do not want people to think that it is, or they will lose even more of their work when it's not. You want them to know things like: If it's not checked in, it doesn't really exist. Always do diffs see you can see what changes are actually going in when you merge a new version. Let your teammate know when you have to work on a document they already have checked out, or you'll clobber each others' changes.
These kinds of things are obviously harder to learn than the mechanics of actually using the version control system. They have to be, or the coders I work with wouldn't make these mistakes so frequently. Since you have to spend some resources giving your doc department this kind of education anyway, you might as well spend some time teaching them how to use a good doc system as well. CVS is truly one of the best.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
HTML and XML formats render well after checking
diffs. This whole concept has huge potential
for writing of all kinds--not just software.
Unfortunately, KWord is still WAY too unstable
and bugy to think about such a feature--although
I do believe I heard it discussed once or twice.
If Linux (Or BSD) is going to win the desktop, we
need new things that make a huge difference like
CVS support for KWord and StarOffice. The "too
technical for non-technicals" argument is made
by people completely lacking in vision. Look at
WebCVS and tell me would could go the extra mile
toward point-n-click user-friendly GUI
interfaces. This could be very useful for me as
well as many many different kinds of writers.
Journalists, Lawyers, Historians, Scientific
Writers, Educational, Business of all sorts..
--Matthew
If you can come up with a simple start-up situation for them (this is how you save, this is how you restore, and this is how to get a not-so-recent version), then they'll be happy.. When they get used to it, and want the more complicated stuff, then you can teach them that part of what the system is capable of doing for them.
Just don't expect them to learn the whole thing from get-go, or they'll run screaming. Teach them what they ask for, and then shutup.
For the curious few, you can teach them more (as much as they're willing to learn at the time). They'll be happy to teach that their colleagues when the time is right. Just be careful with the dangerous stuff ("this is how to delete an entire branch ---- oops.").
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
- Publish documentation in a common format (think HTML or PDF) even though it is authored in multiple formats (Word, Powerpoint)
- Text search, you all use Google, Altavista etc. You need to have the same tools for your document management
- Messaging integration, you may want to be notified when you have to do something, such as review a document
- Security control
- Web access to the inteface is nearly mandatory, why would you want anything else
:)
- You want to be able to annotate the content of the published documents
- You want to be able to integrate with it through standard interfaces
Commercial systems to investigate:I have designed and build several of these type of systems. You generally don't hack together a document management system in a weekened. If you think so, then research your users requirements a bit further.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
Every place I've worked has been in need of something like this. I don't think they've wanted to invest in a fancy/expensive/proprietary system, something open-source would fit great here. CVS can be too complicated for the non-techies. mod_dav on apache already makes a nice way to publish documents from a windows box (just use the MS web-folders icon). Hopefully, the versioning extensions to DAV will be sufficient for managing the versions, but I don't think that part's ready for prime time yet. By the way, subversion (CVS replacement) is closely related, its network protocol is DAV based I believe.
Engineering and Prof Svcs continue to use cvs for source code control and Docushare for all documentation that isn't part of the product itself.
http://docushare.xerox.com
-Hal Incandenza
but in the mean time one could use WinCVS, which I feel is very easy to learn
:)
I agree wholeheartedly that WinCVS is easy to learn. I had to start using it (CVS that is) for a SourceForge project. I'd not had any CVS experience before, ignoring anonymous checkouts, and didn't really understand how it all worked. Once I'd got WinCVS set up though, it was very very easy to understand. I reckon I could manage it from the command line now (but hey, why bother
Cheers,
oojah
--
Do you have any better hostages?
MS Word supports RTF, as do many many different programs. RTF is basically HTML for text documents, and it can handle most of the formatting that Word can do. Word does stick annoying things like the date in on every save, but it shouldn't be too hard to write code that would filter all of that out to avoid conflicts. Word could read the files just fine. Use with WinCVS and anyone can use it.
It works for text and MS Word, things like powerpoint are another issue.
In my experience, most non-techies are just fine with cvsweb and cvs, even the command-line version. Teach some classes. The real problem is word/excel/powerpoint/etc. The binary file formats stink for any doc control system. Diff's are nearly impossible to do, so things become really bloated really fast.
If your boss is serious, then use a different system for your docs, something that uses and xml or other tag-based file format for the on-disk storage. HTML is a really nice format for documentation, as is LaTeX (via one of the LaTeX based word processors). Even Word with the Word to HTML converter would be better than native Word.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Great idea, except that good developers know not to leap into re-inventing a wheel that might already exist, especially at the cost of "a week or two". Don't you think they already have something to occupy their time?
This one should be rated up to +5 Funny. It's more sarcastic than most of you seem to realize. Adding version control for "the rest of the company figures" to use is a BAD idea if you plan on using version control systems that were designed for source code. Just because you have a verion control system that your company uses doesn't mean that the people will use it properly. Trust me!!!!!!!!!!! Without PROPER training with version control systems you'll end up with more hassle than you bargained for. I would NOT recommend a source code version control system for this persons needs. He's not asking for one anyway. The best idea I've read so far was from someone suggesting that a single person manage a directory or documents and does not allow others write access. When something needs to be updated this person manages all of that. Full time job unfortunately. Ok, I've made no sense now and have been unable to communicate my point. I give up, maybe someone can help.
I work in documentation. I've used a bunch of different version controls systems and performed needs analyses a few times when companies I worked for were switching over to "integrated" systems for development and version control, and someone decided that docs should go along for the ride.
Before you decide what system to recommend, you *have* to know what problem you're trying to solve. If the documentation is a mess, is it because you have a million old version sitting on your intranet, or even in binders? Is it because nothing is indexed so you cannot find the information you need, even though you suspect it exists? Is it written for a mess of different audience types? (PHBs, engineers, end-users, marketing?)
If any of these are the root of the problem, any type of version control is not the answer. What you need is a document repository. This can take the form of an intranet (MS's server happily displays office docs, though it will eat tons of drive space) a shared directory, or even a designated bookshelf where all the docs go.
Training whoever produces these docs on whatever system you use probably won't help, because it sounds like the real issue is that they haven't grasped the whole process of information management, notwithstanding whatever tools you provide to them to make that easier.
So, send these people to an information architecture course, or if that doesn't help (since there are a lot of not-super competant people working in docs, I hate to admit) get them an admin or a student co-op whose sole purpose in life is to keep track of these things. It may be a longer-term cost that telling them to use CVS, but it will actually work. Trust me, the problem isn't that they lack the tools. Good documenttion can be produced by quilting, if you're product cycle is long enough. The problem is that your docs manager (if you have one) doesn't understand how to manage information and keep it current. You should get a new one, or send the one you have to training, if you think they're redeemable.
If you are required to come up with some kind of software solution, here are some pro's and cons of systems I have used:
CVS: My personal favorite, I've used it on both UNIX and through a Web front-end. Pros are that it's incredibly flexible, free, and easy to migrate from if you switch to another system later. Cons: You can't diff unless it's a plain text file, and if you throw a lot of office or Frame documents in there, you better have a *lot* of disk space. Plus, we had a lot of resistance from people who had never used versioning. It is surprisingly hard to see the benefits, for a lot of people. We constantly had people writing over files, checking in old verions, and causing all kinds of havoc. Plan on having someone administer to this kind of thing if your user base is how you described it.
Visual Source Safe: Stay Away! I've used this in conjunction with an MS intranet server, which carried a large mixed bag of html and office documents, mostly posted by folks with very little technical knowledge. It was a mess. We ended up devoting a lot of our time just administering the thing, which is not as easy as microsoft likes to claim. and slow Slow SLOW. Sometimes I could hardly believe it. On the plus side, you can visually diff office documents, if you have the patience.
StarTeam: This system is weird. Docs went along with the rest of the engineering group on this one, but it will seem awkward for people unfamiliar with versioning, and it's very quirky. Its collaborative features, like file locking and bug tracking, are really awful.
And remember, version control makes a lot of sense for code development, but not usually as much for docs, because:
There are a lot of documentation consultant companies out there, some of which are very good, and most of which will happily outsource your whole doc department. Consider that option too.
Good luck.
Doing my part to piss off the religious right.
Check it out:
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/cm/cmgr/about_
TWiki, available from http://twiki.org supports revision control of all pages, and is specifically designed for corporate intranets. It lets you use HTML if you want to, so you can just convert your existing Word docs as HTML and import them into the system. (But you'll want to not use HTML for new documents.)
There is a project in the workings called SandWeb. It is based on the ideas from CVSWeb and CVSWebClient. The code is being re-structured and support for multiple Version Control Systems (ie. RCS, CVS, Subversion etc.) will be implemented (CVS first though).
Basically a completed web-based Sandbox management tool. And after that also an RCS browser the CVSWeb and WebCVS.
Anyone looking to help, very welcome. Project at: http://www.sourceforge.com/projects/sandweb/
I would suggest taking a look into MS2's Accelerate product life cycle and document management system. I have been involved in it's implementation and support at our corporation for nearly 2 years and during that time it has grown into a very mature solution that may fit the bill for many companies. For info go to www.ms2.com.
Just my $0.02...
A commercial product which does what you need is Novell Groupwise using its document management libraries.
...although my audience is different -- I'm talking with developers here, so our needs were pretty different.
/. crowd, especially since most of the links to it go to the deprecated wincvs.org site instead of cvsgui.org...
I would like to mention TortoiseCVS, available thorugh http://www.cvsgui.org/TortoiseCVS/ -- it provides Windows Explorer integration for CVS, and makes version control mindlessly easy to use.
This probably won't solve your specific problem (you should listen to the experts on DOCUMENT control for that), but I think it's worth mentioning it to the rest of the
I know it's not stable/feature complete yet, and it doesn't quite yet compare with MS Office, but it does have it's own set of benefits (opensource, etc.). And if you could switch teh "windows users" to OpenOffice (which could probably import most of their word docs, etc.), then you could start them using the XML format -- which then could be saved in CVS! Then you have the problem of uploading/etc. via cvs, which would be best solved with an OpenOffice plugin, but in the mean time one could use WinCVS, which I feel is very easy to learn. HTH, -Dan.
Daniel
Check out MS SharePoint. It may be what you're looking for.
I use CVS exclusively for text/source. How does one ensure that all binary files are properly admin'ed out (-ko -kb)?
--- Every day I am forced to add another to the list of people who can kiss my ass...
We use perforce here at work. It's got client binaries for *nix and Windows, and using it is no harder (once your 'view' is setup) than typing "p4 edit {file}" or "p4 submit {file}". Breezer. Cost is, well, I'm not sure, but I just use the tools, I don't really buy 'em. :P Check Perforce for more information. It works well, we've never had problems with it, so based on that I can endorse it.
good thing the men in black are avid readers of slashdot. rumor has it they're wrestling with this very issue now.
trilogy is code word for cerberus!
You can put documents into it using drag-n-drop from Windows Explorer (it creates a Domino.Doc Neighborhood link from explorer) or do Save As... directly to it.
It's the best I've seen up to now in terms of growth potential, since it can be linked with all Domino Family stuff, like Domino Workflow and whatever other stuff they're selling nowadays.
.sig
is pretty unlikely, but I have to maintain porting to *nix platforms.
Few things I found out about VSS + Unix:
You can buy tools (source offsite from sourcegear) to make it
multiplatform (linux & solaris at least), you need qt available
on the client platfrom and to install services at the VSS-Server.
Performance of this combination is okay
There is a unix version from mainsoft of VSS 5.0 Client,
which is creepingly slow. All you need is to put an NFS-Server
on your VSS-Machine (Server), for that purpose you can use
MS SFU (Services for Unix) or one of the freely available NFS-Servers
for Win32.
big advantage of VSS is easy use
but problems going back in version history occur from time to time
and you wont be happy having many large projects cause VSS will
really be in trouble handling that.
Would be glad about hint for good alternatives, for multiplatform
development (Solaris, Linux for now).
I too recommend CS-RCS. I've been using it for over a year. It's easy to use, integrates with Windows Explorer (and HomeSite!), and yes, you can do diffs on MS Word files. A one-user version is free if you'd like to evaluate it.
Although I can't say it's the greatest system I've ever used, PVCS offers a moderately simple web interface that should work across all OSes. Our non-developers use it to store their documents without too much trouble.
-- What is this Earth thing you call "slow"?
What would work better is something that is nearly automatic allowing the users to seemingly load and save things like they always have. I just haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
While working at a dot.com (from which I was recently laid off) a similar need was identified. One of the top contenders was punch networks. The project was canceled, but they might be able to help.
It's already in Word, it will show you what changes have been made and who changed them. Its a feature heavily used in the book publishing industry where entire books are passed around between the author and various editors. Your question didn't indicate that you need anything more robust than that.
It's already there and its easy to use, so why not?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I wish I'd seen this sooner. I'm having the same problem with CAD documents - large complex binary files, across many computers on a network. And then I need to at least give out unique numbers, be able to find given files reliably, and track revision letters.
In anyone has any advice relating to this I'd greatly appreciate it. Currently we have an old proprietary system that we seem to not have the source to - even though it was made in house.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
ONE and only one version of each document available to the general office staff. This is the version that has been approved by someone in management. When your InstallShield programmer reaches for the Liscense Agreement there is one up-to-date version available.
VP's, lawyers, tech writers, marketing, etc. have access to a second "work-in-progress" document with all the annotation, strike-outs etc.. so they can have meetings and has out whether the document should say "who" instead of "whom".
Older versions of documents are only available when the need is great (fighting off a lawsuit or something.)
Finally, and most important, when someone sends a document out to the public they use the version in your system NOT the version that they downloaded to their local hard drive seven months ago.
It could probably be done with a web interface with links to the documents. Nothing too fancy. Maybe there is a page of "Project X Documents", "Project X Documents (Beta)" (password protected), "Sales Documents" etc.. The hardest part is determining how you want to organize your documents and then establishing a "this is the way we do things here" policy that people stick with. For a company the size mentioned, it doesn't seem to be a full time job once its set up.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
We used WinCVS at my last job. Now up to 1.2. Works decent, at my last job even the engineers weren't all that technical (gee, wonder if that's why we havent' made any money) and works OK.
My shop encountered a similar problem. We needed version control for developers as well as less-technical people who work on documentation. We also didn't want to setup 2 seperate systems. NOR did we want to setup Visual SourceSafe. Trust me, I've had plenty of experience with our clients using it.. it's lousy! (no tcp/ip, not free, and none too stable either) CVS is really solid, and if you're already using it, then great. I'm assuming that these non-technical people you've got are probably using MS Office. They probably don't want to write documents in XML, because they probably just love Word. Here's something we found for them. It's called TortoiseCVS and it's a Windows Explorer shell extention for CVS that works great. It uses overlays to colorize the icon's of documents in various CVS statuses (like up-to-date, conflict, uncommitted). Everything is done by right clicking on the document to get a new version, or commit your current version. For the more technically minded, you can even do tagging and branching through this simple interface. Best of all, it uses standard "CVS" subdirectories to handle the version control information. That means you can really use any other CVS gui (or command line) interface to do other things... like prepare profiles that have the module location already included that you can push out to these users.
So, until they start teaching command line CVS in high school... this should keep you going.
Why would someone want to implement that?
Isn't it okay for people to randomly change business specs on the fly during a project so that there is a near zero chance of success? =P
Plus I like to dig through 30 different docs with different names modified by different people with insanely long filenames.
Gotta go someone just changed the spec without telling anyone again...
Long live document anarchy!
=)
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
In the original, the file was a medical record sort of thing, so it was a doc with a name made up of pateint ssn number, doc ID, and a time/date string. The file names got stored in the db, and the db could launch w to open them via a command.
The only thing I could think of is maybe a widget or macro in word to save the current date/time as part of the file name, along with the user ID, so that as soon as word opened the file, it would be saved with the new file name with the updated data in the name.
Wait, as part of the command line, you can set it up to copy the file to a new name with the propwer date and time info in the name, then feed the string so you have a proper record of it in the database, and then open it in your word processor. This maintains an audit trail, since everytime a doc is opened, a copy is made and saved. You could also include a delete option for just for folks just looking around.
So this is not to hard to do via the database of your choice. Although you better have a lot of drive space for the clueless. A really messy solution, but if you have space to waste, semi-workable. This would work for in house, not webifried.
You would have to add a layer in there some place for converting to web format, depending on the word processor you use.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Component Source's RCS systems can work pretty well with CVS repositories as of the 1.1 release of RCSPro, and gives end-users all the Windows-isms they want, like context menus and pop-up windows when you edit files in most applications. They are also working on direct pserver support for a product called CS-CVS, though I'm not sure if it is an addon for RCSPro or a new product.
I've had a similar issue where I've not been able to run searches of the documents. Xerox has a solution, that is pretty handy, webenabled, but very very expensive
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
Personally, I don't want to do that. I don't know the number of times I've see small hacky projects turn into internal applications that grow out of control.
The other thing about these "internal" projects is that developers never seem to have any time allocated to do this work. No thanks!
If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan - Bill Hicks
Thanks
If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan - Bill Hicks
I just want to keep it as simple as possible for the users so that they will actually use the system.
If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan - Bill Hicks
1,$s/The entire company/Everyone in the company who writes documents/g
If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan - Bill Hicks
OK.
First, I don't need to accept/reject changes to documents.
Second, I'm not overly worried about ownership - initally I don't intend to include sensitive information (salary spreadsheets etc).
Third, I didn't say anything about PDF, but I take your point.
If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan - Bill Hicks
My company has a product that does that. It's very easy for anyone who can use a web browser to use out of the box (it's called "community maintained"), but it's also quite customizable and extensible, and is great for the size of workgroup that the original poster has.
It's not open source, but it is written in Python, and has an XML template language, and there's an extensive set of documentation and interfaces for hacking it yourself.
It supports the kind of meta-data and lightweight workflow you've discussed, is web-centered, but also has a Windows explorer file manager plug-in.
It's called DocuShare. See http://docushare.xerox.com (hosted in DocuShare itself, so you can try it out live).
Your comments are not very insightful -- just ad hominem (well, ad something) attacks. Care to share the joke? The comments of the post you're replying to seem to imply that many are quite pleased with it for its ease of use for non-tech people, its flexibility, and its low price.
for document management - it's okay for that purpose, but quite inflexible for document sharing on an intranet. I've found myself frustrated with this inflexibility quite often. (e.g. you can't easily have a user-friendly index.html pointing to the documents you want to share in a directory). Haven't tried the version control feature.
sulli
RTFJ.
As a systems engineer for a gov contractor, I needed to make a survey for documentation revision control software. Due to my CS background, I immediately thought about CVS, sourcesafe, and other source code revision control packages. The source code revision control packages were not up to the task of documentation revision control. Since systems engineers deal with requirements, and requirments are stored via documentation, every requirements analysis package comes with documentation revision control software. These packages also help to create documents from templates and databases. Depending upon your needs, these documents keep track of customer requirements from concept through delivery/installation, into maintenance.
There are many systems engineering tools that handle requirements analysis in various ways. Many of them work with MS Office (prolly what your writers currently use), and have built in versioning control. My best source for information on these tools was at the INCOSE tools website. This sites lists tools and checks them for the following features...
Store standard document outlines - used as starting points? User definable templates or modifiable?
Produce architecture views from functional and object oriented (OO) perspectives? Examples: WBS, functional , physical, data flow, state diagrams
Support various physical architectures? (View from a number of levels, Black box, Rack, circuit board, chip)
Enable tailoring to specific standards and requirements, IEEE, ISO, MIL-STD?
User friendly & menu driven (drag and drop capabilities)?
Support a single user or multiple concurrent users?
Input document change / comparison analysis
Visibility into existing links from source to implementation--i.e. follow the links.
History of requirement changes, who, what, when, where, why, how.
Baseline/Version control
Access control (modification, viewing, etc.)
. Support of concurrent review, markup, and comment
Multi-level assignment/access control
Plus many more features.
It is my opinion, that the following packages are up to the task:
Cradle
Doors
rtm
rdt
Caliber rm
If you go the page that I linked, it provides an in depth review of each of these tools plus many more.
Keeping
Believe it or not, that's the combo we use. Works well, and LyX even shows the expanded $Id$ on the front page...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Oracle offers some sample code for building a document management system with version control using Oracle IFS here.
Two weeks, one full time developer, $10,000 in lost billable time. Plus maintenance. And I've *never* seen an internally written app that didn't grow once the users got used to what it could do and started to speculate about what it might be able to do with a few changes.
Right. And they'll be more than happy to turn over your development department's Legal, Accounting and Marketing aspects to your band of tech-college hackers (or are they hacks?). Here's a clue: Not understanding what you happen to understand does not make one stupid or unqualified for their job. Hell, I'd wager a weeks pay that there are less than 10 coders in my 70,000+ person company who could be an even passibly good admin assistant for a week.
I can't tell you the number of people I've interviewed with who have been absolutely AMAZED that I don't think of non-techies as ignorant baffoons. Apparantly they've all run into you a bit too often.
However, the inability to learn new things is most certainly a sign of stupidity. Nowhere in my post did I say that there should be a shifting of responsibilities in other departments onto the already overloaded backs of the programming group.
So, I presume if I gave you a violin, you could learn it? Anyone up for some banter po russkii? No doubt you could jump into any job function in your company with a few hours of training and a cheat sheet. Understanding CVS is part of understanding computing systems and it is NOT their job. It's yours. Indeed, it's your job solely to help them do their jobs, unless you're in a development house, in which case it's likely that it's your job to help people in other companies do their jobs.
We're IT. We're the support staff of modern industry. And no, you did not say there should be a shifting of responsibilities in other departments onto the already overloaded backs of the programming group (which apparantly has plenty of time to post on /.). But if you go back and read, you specifically recommended shifting the responsibilities of IT onto every other department. It's the job of the person who asked the question to make some sort of system work for the rest of his company with minimal imposition on the rest of the company - just as it's the responsibility of payroll to make sure you get paid on time just for handing in a sheet of paper or filling out an on-line form. Without payroll people, we starve. Without us, they lose their documents. It's neither their job to know or care how to do ours nor vice-versa.
Of course, division of labor is a management issue, and differing skills and predispositions are psychological issues, and you're obviously way to stupid to learn those ideas, and thus have no place in IT and should be shoveling shit for a living.
Microsoft Visual Source Safe.
It stores versions, has a nice, friendly, Explorer-like interface, and runs on windows. Sounds like that's all the management wants. As long as they don't want to branch documents (which I recall being a bit of a bitch), they should be fine.
(All of this with the note that I'm *pretty* sure that VSS handles binaries alright, even though it may not be able to do such things as diffs, even on files in a proprietary format from it's own company.)
There are a few commercial vendors for Document/Content Management. One that I have a vested interest in is Xpedio from IntraNet Solutions. There is an EJB for J2EE support. And of course you can view content through HTML, WML, or native format if you don't have the application that the documents were originally created in.
Note that Xanadu does not exist, being the king of vaporware. Nelson might have been the first to use the word hypertext, but it's too bad he never managed to finish anything...
Honestly for simple, remotely accessible, and end user friendly document management, I would recommend using SharePoint. Downside is it won't run on Apache which sux (Only IIS), but if you take a look at the features, it will likely have what you need and more. I didn't catch the number of documents you are attempting to organize, so if you need batch processing then it'll likely require some simple VB scripting. I've got a copy of the release version, which ships with Office XP, and will install on a private site on one of my Internet servers if you want to take it for a spin. Before changes jobs, I was the Lead Beta Engineer at MS for this product (Used to be Office Web Server before the fancy name). It can export lists to excel files with the click of a button and can easily be modified to add features or remove features you don't want. It's all HTML/ASP and works as an "Out of the box" solution in many cases. If you are keeping previous versions of documents and want them listed in archive fashion, some SQL queries must be modified or added. If it's more involved than what SharePoint is capable of, I would recommend a custom built app from an ASP or outsourced developer (Keeps things on schedule and prohibits unnecessary updates). Email me ben@optisonic.net if you want a demo, need more info, etc. Regards, Ben
Have a look at Component Software. It's windows, it does binaries and ascii, and you don't need to understand CVS (although it uses CVS). You can't really run a diff on a binary but you can retrieve and view previous versions.
What about using a journaled filing system?
Surely by now there must be a Microsoft-compatible implementation of a journalled filing system available. One that has a relatively friendly user interface.
With that, it doesn't matter what format the file might be in, you have a sense of 'version' in that the latest file within the system would become the file of interest. If you should discover that the file needs to be 'rolled back' you simply acquire one from an earlier time-stamp. Something like that should be fairly intuitive to work with, I should think.
And so it goes.
mesasys.com
Web-based, built around CVS, very easy to use and get used to. It's not JUST version control, but you buy what you need. You can also view docs on the web, from particular applications (Adobe Acrobat® , Artemis® Views® , Computer Associates COOL: Teamwork® , Computer Associates ERwin(TM) , Foresight Systems Foresight(TM), Microsoft Excel , Microsoft PowerPoint , Microsoft Word , Microsoft® Project , Microsoft® Visio® , Popkin System Architect(TM) , Primavera Project Planner® , PTC Pro/ENGINEER® , Rational® ClearCase® , Rational® ClearQuest(TM) , Rational® Rose® , Scitor Project Scheduler 7(TM) , Telelogic DOORS® , Telelogic Tau UML(TM) ).
tell them Curran sent you :)
If you don't find what you're looking for, the aerospace world has some excellent best practices for documentation configuration management in more NASA specifications than I care to think about. If interested, email.
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-- Geof F. Morris
At www.wincvs.org (site is down now but it does exist) and www.CVSgui.org for alternatives. Traditional commandline tools emacs etc all work with the resulting repository so it's really great for group development of HTML projects. There is also a plugin for Windows Explorer that lets you browse **RCS** controlled files and do simple version control right within your filemanager. http://www.ComponentSoftware.com/csrcs/ ... not sure if it could be made to work with CVS but I doubt it.
(replying to myself ... sigh)
Take a look at:
http://www.cvsgui.org/TortoiseCVS/
you can do more than just RCS from inside Explorer after all ;-)
A number of good comments appear below, but let me suggest a different approach.
Managing a pool of published documents often doesn't need or respect the level of structure we use with source code. What are the business problems that led to this request? They may well be simply that nobody is sure which file version matches which publication date, that some files are missing, that nobody knows who reviewed which version, etc. In other words, these may be management problems rather than technical problems.
Very robust business solutions can be implemented just by defining and publishing simple common-sense procedures. "Every document has an official binder with the current hardcopy version. Before editing the document, you must have the binder sitting on your desk, you must save the new file with today's date, and you must put your initials and date on the title page in the binder."
So for example, you might create a directory tree for all published documents, and put somebody in charge (nothing goes in except through that person). At each node of the tree, create a tracking document recording all the associated leaves, with their titles, version numbers, draft dates, review dates, publication dates, authors, reviewers, etc. True, a software product could do this; but you're not usually dealing with hundreds of document state changes a day; you have a user's manual that Joe is revising for a month, that gets turned over to Sue for a few days, that goes back to Bob the librarian for final publication. This workflow can easily be managed on paper.
If you can't figure out the correct workflow and the handoffs of responsibility, or people won't go along with the rules, then no automated system will do any good.
So by all means, look for an off-the-shelf product; but if you don't find one, try to solve the problem on paper first. For some extra glory and elegance, cons up a simple form-based app that lets you keep track of the document names, dates, approvals, etc., and you'll be the documentation god.
JMHO -- Trevor
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
It's trivial to save the file using the native application, and it's also trivial to extract the document out of Docs, as well as EMail a reference to another user.
-- [ta]
There is a product called DocsOPEN made by Hummingbird I beleive. We use it at my office. It is WELL worth working into, and it integrates into almost everything windows. There is also a web interface for it called CyberDOCS.
Basically, instead of saving your files to a drive, Docs comes up and asks you to fill out a form. The file gets saved somewhere mysterious, the data goes into a serachable database, and you get on with your life. Later you call it up by searching for it, and you can add a new version when you save it. It's pretty neat. However, it is hard to get people to use unless you beat them over the head.
-- [ta]
First, if all you're after is the ability to accept/reject changes to documents, then the simplest solution you want is to turn on the "Track Changes" option. You can leave the master "track" on, then either display or not display changes in either printed or written form. Also, you can selectively accept those changes to the base master document. All changes are also tracked by author, time/date, etc.
Second, if what you're after is protection of source files, then you really are going to have to implement a VCS for your writers. I've used a number of them, and fundamentally, none of them are easy for non-technical people to use without training/etc. Perforce and Clearcase both work reasonably well for cross-platform doc checkin, but, well, they're not exactly the easiest thing in the world to use. A simpler solution might be to have a decent server, and have it incrementally back up _every_ change to the doc section. You'd be surprised how easy that makes it to roll back changes. If you're also willing to be a little anal in the server setup about who owns files, it should become fairly easy, fairly quickly to resolve ownership/etc. issues.
Third, I noticed you were also talking about PDFs, and how the documentation was difficult to access. Two points here. The first is that you probably should stress to much about storing output (PDFs, generated HTML) in VCS, rather than storing source files. If you can store source properly, storing generated doc (PDF/HTML) becomes _very_ easy. The second is that making your documentation easy to access is an entirely different issue from puttingg it in a VCS. That's a matter of putting together a clear, logical structure that makes sense.
As a case in point, one of my clients about a year ago had _all_ of their documentation stored in VCSs. Their problem was not that it wasn't protected - it was that, in the course of 2 mergers, and going through 4 different writing teams, they'd _lost_ their documentation source. So before I could write word one, I had to go find the docs, sort out the doc structure, and get everything so it could once again be found and accessed.
One relatively easy-to-use structure that I've seen involved differentiating the source vs. output, and making the output available on an internal webserver. Output was automatically regenerated on a regular basis (simple scripts took care of most of it, or you can use the monkey model, and do it manually), so it was available to the entire company. Those people who needed to mess with the source files were taught how to use the VCS.
Despite developing on and for Solaris, I've had to use "Word" to do documentation at several different employers.
Using "Word" makes versioning almost useless - it may be possible to do a "diff" between two versions of a "Word" document, but almost nobody knows how to do so. About the best you can do is put in those goofy "change bars", which makes me feel like I'm in the military, and are fairly easy to overlook. And it only gets worse if Excel "workbooks" are what you're controlling. Most managers use Excel as a way to keep text in columns, because "Word" is so crappy at doing tables.
The real problem you're facing is not finding an appropriate version control system, but whether you should bother with this sort of thing at all. For the most part, "non-technical" people don't seem to care about keeping revisions straight, so I think you'd be fighting an uphill social battle to get them to use any versioning at all.
Check out WebDAV
Started off at M$...now it's trying to be standard.
It's implemented in SharePoint Portal Sever (SPS) formerly know as Tahoe.
It's pretty cool, actually...tries to find the compromise between a beefy versioning system and something that can be employed with HTTP headers and XML "messages."
As far as SPS is concerned...it can search many M$ documnets, like Word, Excel...prolly can search *.pdf docs as well.
But, alas...it's a M$ product...
For Windows, VSS is definitely easy to use and works well. It does handle binary files (any format) and does do diffs.
I've used MS VSS for documents (along with software projects) off and on since about 97 and can say that it does work. The last time I helped set up management types, we were able to glue the Checkin/Checkout options right into MS Word's menu bar for them.
If you want to hook into it from a Linux machine, there may be hope if you know how to RMI to an ActiveX compatible process that executes your commands via the VSS automation interface. (VSS exposes the whole API through ActiveX automation. You can get all the technical details on the MSDN site link here.)
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~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Okay, assuming you can't answer your own question about this, it sounds like any system you're going to implement is probably going to involve a bit of a learning curve. Why not, instead of trying to learn some sort of standard versioning system, implement your own, custom suited for your needs? VB is relatively painless and integrated into all your office aps, you could easily throw in a save macro or a get macro that'll access the versions you want, and differentiate between all the versions out there. Plus, VB coders aren't the most expensive thing to bring in out there, and if you had someone on staff with a little extra time, they could probably figure it out for themselves. It's a joke language, but it's a functional joke language.
At my old office we tended to make versioning transparent -- ie: the file names had version information built into them. It was a choice that got made for the system early on and it worked out pretty well.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
My company - a large Telecom equipment maker - has begun to shift development and product documentation from a proprietary system, to a combination of ClearCase, a popular commercial version control system, and MS SourceSafe.
For ease of use and based on cost I'd have to say, for your application (as much as it pains me) Microsoft SourceSave would be a good choice.
Just my 2 cents
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Well, I'm 20, so you're just a bit off...
I'm just a coder... the only coder at my company, actually. The only "presentations" I give are me bitchslapping my boss for his stupid ideas.
Really, though, what can you do in powerpoint that you can't do in Flash?
Heh... doing all the documentation for my programs has corrupted me. I code all my HTML by hand.
Ween them off of Office. Give them Macromedia Dreamweaver. Its user friendly, and other than generating documents with 50% whitespace (thanks to a built-in code beautifier), the HTML is usually pretty good.
And now I look like a macromedia salesman... oh well.
I write CGI apps. If they're computer literate enough to install the apps, they know how to work the "printer".
Why not use HTML? I've been using HTML for years for all of my documentation. It works perfectly for a cross-platform manual accessable from anywhere.
If you need powerpoint-type presentations, Flash is easy to use, fast, and readable on nearly all modern browsers. You can even generate it with PHP or PERL.
One of his best:
"It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I think it's a mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there and take a look at it, and you can make the determination as to how beautiful that country is." --George W. Bush, at a White House Press conference, March 29, 2001
As for the financial health of the company...I think that the weblication nature of this application insulates a purchaser more than a compiled application. Having access to the source is the ultimate insurance policy.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
If you need an easy to use UI, take a look at Xerox Docushare or perhaps if you want to lean toward groupware look at Amphora.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Almost forgot- CVS handles binaries just fine. Add -kb entries to cvswrapper for binary file types to instruct CVS to turn off linefeed conversion and ignore special CVS tags.
You don't need another client to do checkouts. TortoiseCVS can't create new root level modules, but you may not want the uninitiated doing that anyway.
Check out TortoiseCVS from the CVSHome website. It's an add-on to Windows Explorer that adds status dependent color shading to CVS controled directories and context sensitive commands to the Explorer file menu. Comes with a bundled SSH client for secure tunneling.
Easy to install and VERY easy to use, and no, I don't have anything to do with the project. I just use it.
You could wrestle with Sharepoint Portal and spend 3000$ on it and 67$ per CAL. You could also use CVS, and try to put square pegs in round holes.
-BUT-You could just buy a copy of Office XP and use Office Team Services for free. Comes on the XP resource kit. Works like buttah. You just lose the shell integration crap that you get with Sharepoint.
Not sure how well it works with previous Office versions, but for the price of some of the Document control systems, you could upgrade to XP with a kick ass document control system thrown in to boot. Worth investigationg anyway.
Here is a linkMake it a malt liquor. I want to be as clever and handsome as possible.
-g
Hate to make a plug for a former employer.. but Planet-Intra has a good product that wont cost you much and will do the job well. You can buy the product or you can rent the space on their servers to keep your stuff.
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They refer to it as "document management." While a big part of that is also a matter of FINDING the documents (think of alllll that paper), the most challenging part remains tracking changes. You might want to contact a company that I've dealt with in the past who makes a fantastic system (sorry, it's not open source) called iManage. It's overkill for what you need, but you may be able to show them another market they haven't thought of, and develop something with them to suit your purposes.
And no, I don't work for iManage, have any stock (if they are traded, even), or anything of the sorts. I just really liked the product when I helped implement it a few years ago, and know it does a good job.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
We use WinCvs and Chora to version control both source code and documentation. In fact, it is because we were using Chora as a web interface to our documentation that I uncovered a bug a month or two ago affecting the handling of filenames with spaces (like Marketing Proposal 1.doc) that we often see in documents created by non-programmers. I fixed the bug myself and contributed the fix back into the Chora project, so you shouldn't see this problem in the latest version of Chora). I've packaged recent versions of Chora into zip files - available for download here. (Use Ctrl-F to search for Chora on the page)
I have to admit, though, that while the non-technical people at our company have managed to learn how to use CVS, it was not without a lot of struggle on their part. Maybe SourceSafe or Perforce would have been a better choice. Even so, what we have now works and people have become familiar with it, so I don't think we'll change.
sig: BeanShell: lightweight scripting for Ja
Bentley has ProjectWise, which when administered well, is a good document control system. http://projectwise.bentley.com/
Apache's Slide project offers (well, eventually it will): Web based GUI, User management, Security, Locking, Versioning, Indexing, Searching, and more. It's based on a open protocol: WebDAV, so it should integrate (well, eventually it will) with other tools. See: http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/index.html
It took me less than two weeks to write a version control/archive system in asp, using an oracle database for document info and saving files to the filesystem. The advantage to it was that it used an interface they were already used to using (web browser), so they didn't have to be trained to use it.
You may want to consider writing your own, it has some distinct advantages:
You only have to pay for the time it would take someone to code it.
The system will match the needs of your particular company.
The system can be changed at any time if your needs change.
- harborpirate -
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
Sometimes it really sucks ass and eats a file or shows you the wrong status, but for the most part, it's great, and it's much more prone to error on the user side than it is with the client or server, and in most cases we have artists, not writers or programmers to blame for that.
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My company bills my time at 250.00 an hour (for customizing our apps). I do not make anywhere near that much. Of course I'm pretty busy with non-billable (ie reading Slashdot, learning new tricks, developing new product) activities which is handled in a different manner. I have worked in an engineering firm where the billable hour was God Almighty. It was interesting
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
If overkill is your thing then you may want to look at Opentext. Their BASIS product seems to do everything you want. It supports over 250 document formats ranging from plain text to binaries to XML/SGML. It has secure access, is cross platform, and supports document check-outs.
Another possible option is Athena from Global Recall. This is what we use here and it seems pretty comprehensive. One nice option it has is the ability to render office documents to web. While I haven't had to deal with the version control aspect of it the online documentation seems to tout it a lot.
Most people don't know this about me or my government because the media makes me out to be tech-illiterate, but I use Clearcase myself at my workplace, and it can handle files of any arbitary type. It integrates seamlessly with the Windows shell (right-click context menus, etc). I don't know if this is non-technical enough for your users, but certainly a far cry from the various command line tools like CVS, etc.
--
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
Have a look at the DocBook/XML system. It is used by a lot of Open Source projects, including PHP and phpOpenTracker. A variety of XSL stylesheets exist, for transformation from XML to HTML, PDF or LaTeX for instance.
WinCVS looks exactly like the application that all the UI text books warns you against.
*Not* user friendly.
It looks like someone had a seizure attack while drawing all those buttons.
Too cluttered, too messy, too unorginized.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
You didn't met a lot of users, have you?
They would read *just enough* to know how to get things wrong, trust me on this one.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I agree whole heartedly. Of course even the real Theo can't be that dense about supporting business. In IT our job is to support the people who earn the money to pay our paychecks. As a general rule they are not stupid. They may not be too computer literate but they obviously have some skill that the company finds useful. We are viewed as a drain on resources by the number crunchers. Either implement solutions that the others can use easily and efficiently or be able to explain concisely and clearly why it is not possible at this time. If you treat them with contempt and don't try to make things easier for them, then one day they will come to the conclusion that there is no earthly reason for you to be on the payroll. You may be the best coder or admin in the world but if you don't work with them for the best possible solutions from their point of view then you aren't worth near as much as the less competent person that is willing to bend over backward to help.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
folder action converts .doc to RTF, .XLS to tab seperated.
They'll lose all macros and lose formatting and layout in Excel that way. Maybe not the best approach.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
...is Interwoven's Teamsite. My impression is that it's more geared to building web sites than internal documentation, but it still might interest you.
T-Ranger is right -- you'll probably have to spend some big bucks here, at least as things currently stand. This sounds like a good free software project for some enterprising programmer out there...!
1) Switch to LaTeX
2) Teach them CVS
haha!
I'm only partially joking however. That would be SO NICE.
Regardless, CVS handles binaries (albeit inefficiently) and isn't that hard to use with wincvs.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
However, the inability to learn new things is most certainly a sign of stupidity. Nowhere in my post did I say that there should be a shifting of responsibilities in other departments onto the already overloaded backs of the programming group.
--
Theo DeRaadt
Founder, OpenBSD project.
Don't bother trying to get an "easy to use" solution, which will take up valuble system resources just to run. Anything worth doing can be done from something simple like CVS.
If they are really so dumb that they CAN'T learn CVS, well, its time to tell them that they are in the wrong field, and that they should consider a carrer in garbage collection or burger flipping. Tough love oughta get them educated real fast.
--
Theo DeRaadt
Founder, OpenBSD project.
You probably need to have someone in control over the mess, and if that person can manage a directory tree which is read-only to everyone but the archivist you could easily keep a "history" directory beneath each leaf and stick old versions down there (with filenames containing the date of the revision). That would give you lots of history and a ready means of re-organizing if you find a tool that lets you manage things more easily in the future.
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It can be very embarrassing to have all of the private comments revealed to the other party when you didn't realize there were there. Increasingly firms are checking for these things as well.
Word 2002, from the Office XP suite, includes a Security Tab on the Options settings. In there you'll find a Privacy section which gives you checkboxes for things like deleting personal information on save and "Warn before sending, saving or printing" a document that has file revision tracking turned on.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
A product from Borland call JDataStore, is a very high performance pure Java database system which has the particularity (in addtion to being a JDBC/SQL compliant DB) to also being able to store documents of any type directly into a built-in file system.
The examples that come with the distribution actually show you how to store and load files from it. You can then use an upload Servlet, and coouple that with a few JSP (Java Server Pages), and voila you got something which works anywhere.
Note that you will still need to program a way to keep older versions of documents, and a way to implement a locking mechanism for people to check out and check in files. I'm sure any competent programmer can accomplish all this in about a 2 weeks of work, and add another week for fine tuning and testing.
Note however that I assume that (1) storage space is not an issue, considering how cheap hard drives are these days, and (2) that you will not write any sophisticated mechanisms to store only the changes to a document, but rather that you will save ALL versions of all the documents, along with the choice to erase older versions (either with a fixed ptogramatically-fixed time variable, a user command, or both).
Please spare all the flames please, I KNOW there are commecial solutions, I KNOW this is a very simple solution, I'm JUST offering ONE possible solution to the poster's problem. Please spare all the "you can do this better with PHP or ASP, etc". Use the tools you want.
Note that I have already implemented systems which can do all this as outlined above, just not for the same problem domain, so I know what I'm talking about.
I hope this helps.
p.s.: You can use the free Tomcat Servlet/JSP engine to do this.
Cobalt makes the little Qube network servers, with something like 20 gigs of drive space, some RAM, and proc for under 2000.00. These boxes come with a document control and search engine software installed. They run linux, but I believe that the document control and search is proprietary. Might want to check it out at Cobalt Networks now owned by Sun microsystems.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Have you looked at MERANT PVCS Version Manager? It works on all Windows platforms, Linux, and UNIX. Same GUI interface for all and you can scale the product from simple to complex. You can also centralize your Document Archive on one machine and access it from anywhere.
I work for a worldwide law firm and we use DOCSOpen. There were some issues with it early on, but they all seem to have been ironed out in the current version. It is straightforward for non-technical people, and the IT folks have a good deal of control over how it is implemented, so you can make it even less technical if need be. While away from the office I have been able to access DOCS from the web, but your functionality will greatly depend on the connection. Make sure its a good one before undertaking a large doc retrieval. The other advantage is that since of our offices use it, we can access all of that information. In other words I can pull up in SV a doc from our DC or SF office with minimal lag time. This is one to look into.
Two weeks, one office employee: $600.
Five weeks, 3 part-time developers: $59,000.
Q4 earnings time, the look on the boss's face: priceless.
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else there's Corporate Mastercard.
--
"Fuck your mama."
I had similar problems working with the non-tech business types at my company. They're business documents are in disarray. They wanted a web solution but neither cvs, clearcase, or sourcesafe met their needs. They got too frustrated trying to make it work for them.
Have you tried Punch WebGroups? It's a service for online document collaboration. They have version control and publish rights. There is also a user subscription list that gets emailed everytime someone updates a document. It's a nice solution for non-tech folks. The first 2 web projects or groups and 10mb of space are free. I use it for small projects and it works pretty well.
I guess this won't go down well, but we use Mickeysoft's SourceSafe for all our version control and I would recommend checking it out. Admittedly there's the cost factor involved in that, and the administration. However, having used CVS for a while, there are limitations in that software that were hard to work around, and administration was no breeze either. No doubt it's improved in the past two and a half years, but I can't comment.
By far the best system I've used is Clearcase, but that requires an enormous effort in administration (we had 3 full-time and 2 part-time admins on it for a project spanning multiple continents and with some 80 developers, and that was just in one of the offices - I have no idea about the others). That was back before it was sold to Rational and running on HPUX though, and I've heard terrible stories about the performance of the Windows client. Oh, and it costs an absolute bomb.
My experience has been that a 30 minute course for the non-technical will bring them sufficiently up to speed on SourceSafe. A well structured SourceSafe database and a couple of clicks can allow non-technical people access and control over their documents at a centralised network location whilst maintaining version control. Note that the structure of the folders (Projects in SS terminology) is worth investing time in figuring out because it can make a world of difference to how accessible your documents will be - and that's a large part of the problem when you're dealing with non-technical people.
This of course presumes that you want a system that handles both code and document control. There are dedicated document revision control systems out there, but I have not had experience of them. At one point we built our own simple one, but I was never fully convinced of the benefit of doing that, though it leads me to believe that good commercial products may not be as plentiful as hoped for.
For the cheapest route, CVS is probably best. There are other GUI solutions available than PCVS, though I haven't tried them out, and I don't know how well they're supported. I presume you've found this page already. A quick perusal and TortoiseCVS seems a fair approximation to what you want (I presume your users are technical enough to use Windows Explorer if they are writing Powerpoint presentations), though their website is down at the moment (perhaps that's a bad sign).
I hope that's of some use to you.
Cheers,
Nixta
Probably not as bad as unix. But it takes about a minute for every 100 files that you check out, even if you're just doing a "get" update. It (at least 6.5) has no tool for doing a directory diff. And the branching support is laughable. Stay far, far, away from this "tool". It truly deserves to go out of business.
I've used Oracle IFS it does all your asking for and is accessible through FTP, HTTP, WCP, SMTP and many other protocols. Document versioning, Text searches etc.... It appears as a regular network drive in the network. Teaching non-technical personnel is easy. Of course you need Oracle to run it, it uses Apache to server the web front. I've also used an OpenSite product called Livelink which is currently being used by the US Navy. Livelink is ok but not quite like Oracle IFS. I would much rather have Oracle IFS, its easy to install and configure, It took me 2 weeks to set up, desing folder hierarchy, create accounts, set level permissions, etc... Everything is stored in the DB so back up is a breeze (considering you have a Oracle DBA). Hope this helps.
Let me see, nope just as I thought.
Try doing File, Versions. With the amount of changes MS has to do on their programs, you KNOW they had to build this in. VSS probably has some sort of version control for documents too. --- "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da. That's all I;ve got to say to you."
The source code at that point was revision controlled in SCCS (yuck) but the documentation was not. Seems very much like your situation I guess.
Putting the documentation in a CVS project along with the software itself would work pretty well, except that CVS will not do delta's on the binary files but will store each revision pretty much in it's binary format in the repository. This is not a big problem as disk space s cheap.
Also, teaching people how to use some windows CVS client shouldn't be a big issue I believe. However, I've found in the past that people often *want* the GUI version first and within a few weeks are asking me 'so how can I use that command line version you're using'.
Personally I like to teach people a few very simple things:
- TortoiseCVS integrates seamless on Windows desktop an permits to control entire trees, but you must have a CVS server to store archives. - CS-RCS shareware (ssite) has a easy interface, integrates with MS-Word version control and Windows desktop, and uses RCS archive format like CVS. But can be little slow in large trees. I have developed my own solution, a web interface to mantain baselined trees of code + documentation (Office) of software development process. I'm planning a simple version, for documentation only.
Sophisticated documentation control packages can deal with a-pages for corrections made to documents. However, many people I know in the industry do not like using a-pages... so the easiest thing is to set up a document repository. I have done this in the past for the purpose of storing SW development artifacts... One reasonable repository is to use a newsgroup. That way you get to see a threaded history for the document (including reviewer's notes). Just don't expire the articles!