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Document Management and Version Control?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the need-not-be-mutually-exclusive dept.

Tom wonders: "I am working in a medium-sized software development company. The functional analysts use Microsoft Word to document the specifications, and Sharepoint to publish the documents. However we'd like to improve our process to have better revision control and traceability. We have looked at alternatives like using Wikis, or static HTML documents with CVS. The functional analysts want ease of use, while we developers would like to see high-quality end products, revision control (i.e. tagging & branching of the document base), and traceability features. What tools and document formats do you use and would recommend?"

2 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Baby step #1: source control + existing docs by dsandler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's pretty shocking to change everything (document format, writing environment, collaboration tools) all at once. Start with reasonable source control, the best bacon-saving device you can get. Have everyone check existing docs (Word, HTML, whatever) into source control; Even though diffs are meaningless for the binary formats, the other benefits (versioning, collaboration, remote storage, tags, platform independence) are huge. It's the quickest way to put an end to the madness of emailed .doc files and accidental deletions.

    If you've got a lot of Windows users, go with Subversion and get everyone to install the TortoiseSVN shell extension, which offers the most natural GUI for new (and experienced!) users of version control.

    Once everyone's comfortable with SVN, you can then start migrating to text-based document formats in which the source control diffs mean something (LaTeX, XML, reStructured, etc.)

  2. Svnwiki, of course by Azul · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would suggest using svnwiki, a wiki system that stores its whole contents in a Subversion repository (Disclaimer: I am the main author of svnwiki). That allows you to use the usual svn commands (svn diff, svn log, svn update, etc.) to work with your wiki as well as using the web interface.

    You can see an example wiki (in spanish) and its associated svn repository (login as anonymous, password is the empty string; Slashdot seems to strip out this auth information from my URL) to get an idea of what the repository looks like.

    These are examples of some of its features: