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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?"

6 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. The simple answer by Ckwop · · Score: 5, Informative

    Latex with CVS. This is what I use for my documents. It's simple (yes it is simple.. markup languages are not hard to understand) and with CVS it's far more feature complete than Word in version control.

    There's plenty of WYSIWYG tools for Latex. Let Google be your guide.

    Simon.

    1. Re:The simple answer by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Informative

      There's plenty of WYSIWYG tools for Latex.

      I'm always happy to see fellow TeX evangelists here. If you don't know about LaTeX yet, check out the TeX Frequently Asked Questions and discover the joys of a typesetting system that is not only high-quality, but free as in freedom and immensely extendable.

      LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor. A good and free as in beer guide to the system is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e , though if you are going to be markup up lots of math (LaTeX's specialty) you'll probably want Graetzer's Math Into LaTeX since LShort doesn't cover it so much.

  2. 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.)

  3. SVN + WebDAV + Autoversioning by HFShadow · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.webdav. autoversioning.html

    From the SVN Handbook:
    "Because so many operating systems already have integrated WebDAV clients, the use case for this feature borders on fantastical: imagine an office of ordinary users running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. Each user "mounts" the Subversion repository, which appears to be an ordinary network folder. They use the shared folder as they always do: open files, edit them, save them. Meanwhile, the server is automatically versioning everything. Any administrator (or knowledgeable user) can still use a Subversion client to search history and retrieve older versions of data."

  4. Re:Subversion...[*Does* Call Binary Diff Tools] by malloc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course, Subversion is no more your friend than CVS in this case since neither can do proper diffs! It's binary data for f*ck sake! Subversion handles binaries better than CVS, but not for the reason you state.

    Actually, GUI Subversion clients like TortoiseSVN can show diffs for binary files like Word or OpenOffice, using the built-in diff capability of these programs. The end result is you can double-click your binary document and get a window showing you the differences.

    The latest nightly TortoiseSVN builds even include an image diff viewer.

    -Malloc
    --
    ___________________ I want to be free()!
  5. 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: