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."

Comments

I think you're missing the point

[johnnyb]

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.

Binary File Version Control - problems with it

[ShannonClark]

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

Chaos to the rescue

[Ralph Wiggam]

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

Commercial DM Products

[TheCrayfish]

Check out the products available from Hummingbird, Documentum, and Eastman. A long list of document management vendors lives here.
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uphill battle

[Speare]

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.

As much as I hate to say it...

[MacGabhain]

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.)