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Cross Platform Document Management Systems?
Alan asks: "I'm
looking for a way to do document management at the office. We have
windows people and linux people, some writing documents that are a few lines (developer notes for example) and others are full of charts, graphs, etc. Currently we have a file server that has shares
set up for the documentation, but it lacks any sort of revision
control, and with the salespeople writing in Microsoft Word there are
cross-platform issues. We were thinking of setting up an wiki or an everything-based site, but as it is
only text, it's not good enough for everyone. There is also the
matter of getting our master documentation (which is in PDF format)
accessable to everyone as well, possibly in an XML format that can be
imported into indesign or Pagemaker or something. There are lots of
solutions that work for different departments and different systems, but
it would be nice to have something that works for everyone."
Why not just stick with PDF for everybody? There are plenty of free (beer/speech) utilites out there to make any document a PDF in Linux, as well as (costly perhaps) Acrobat for Windows. That solves you're common format problem...and you could use any one of the bazillions of version control systems to manage the PDFs.
PDF? Only useful if document revisions and annotations are only done by the original author!