Ask Slashdot: Version Control For Non-Developers?

occamboy writes My spouse works at a company that deals with lots of documents (Word, spreadsheets, scans, and so forth), and they have a classic version control problem that sucks up hours of her time each week. Documents are stored on a shared server in some sort of hierarchy, but there are all kinds of problems, e.g. multiple copies get saved with slightly-different names because people are afraid of overwriting the old version 'just in case' and nobody can figure out which is the latest version, or which got sent out to a client, etc.

Version control should help, and my first thought was to use SVN with TortoiseSVN, but I'm wondering if there's something even simpler that they could use? Do the Slashdotteratti have any experiences or thoughts that they could share? The ideal solution would also make it easy to text search the document tree.

Comments

perforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy to install, free for 20-users or less, rock solid, and clients for many OSes. Most importantly, it supports single-user checkouts, which is vital for things like Word documents that won't merge.

Re:perforce

[malacandrian]

Won't merge? Word has built in merge and diff tools https://support.microsoft.com/...

Re:perforce

[monkeyzoo]

As someone who trained people on my team in the video game industry in how to use Perforce who were already familiar with version control concepts, I would reiterate that I don't see any of the above as viable solutions for this bloke. It's exactly the point that all of these tools are going to require non-trivial training, and do you think this guy is going to be able to tell his wife... "Hey! I asked Slashdot, and they recommended Perforce (or git or SVN or CVS or VCS or PVCS or whatever!), so just teach that to your colleagues and you're all set!"

No. What they can perhaps nominally hope for is to get everyone to switch to Google Docs which does version control and concurrent editing and merging without you asking. Heck even the built-in MS Office does versioning, but again, that is going to require team training and buy-in. Meh

To reiterate, I like Perforce a lot and found the reward for spending the time to understand its core concepts worthwhile, but its learning curve is steeper than other tools out there. And if git ever got decent GUI tools, it would beat its pants off.

Document Management System

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like Alfresco ?

DON'T use git....

[bobbied]

Lord help you if you do... It's bad enough for source code, but it's horrible for Office documents.... On the plus side, everybody has their own local repository so loosing data due to drive failures is minimized over having everything on a server, but all that pushing and puling with merging is painful on things like word documents...

I'd avoid Subversion

[alvinrod]

I'd avoid SVN for anything that isn't a flat text file, otherwise it becomes a pain to merge or determine what the actual difference between two files is. I'm not aware of anything that will make viewing diffs for Word documents human readable. Never mind that some of the people who need to use it will probably be a afraid of it or have even more basic problems like forgetting to commit.

If they're not doing anything that requires absolute security or precise formatting, something like Google docs might work reasonably well. It's simple to use and doesn't require the users to understand the complexities of version control. No idea if there's anything that can be hosted locally in case the company can't or would prefer not to put the data on Google's servers.

Re:I'd avoid Subversion

[AikonMGB]

I'd avoid SVN for anything that isn't a flat text file, otherwise it becomes a pain to merge or determine what the actual difference between two files is. I'm not aware of anything that will make viewing diffs for Word documents human readable.

TortoiseSVN already does this. It uses the hooks in Office to create what is basically a "track-changes" copy, where previous version is the base, and new version is if you accept all changes. This is about as good as it gets to diffing Word files, and flows logically with how they were intended to be used in businesses anyway. It will do the same for Excel, but it's... a monster that should never be allowed to live.

Re:Business problem != technology problem

[khasim]

For other types of documents, it's a matter of defining a process and naming convention on how to keep a track of items.

Seconded. It's also easier (in my experience) to get non-tech people to understand a naming standard than it is to get them to learn a new app.

You do NOT want to be the one who has to help everyone find their "lost" documents that NEED TO BE SENT RIGHT NOW IT IS A CRISIS WE WILL LOSE THIS ACCOUNT AND IT WILL BE YOUR PROBLEM OF COURSE I CHECKED IT IN YOUR APP LOST THEM.

Alfresco

[Anonymous Coward]

Alfresco has a versioning capability: http://docs.alfresco.com/4.0/concepts/versioning.html

Document Version Control

[Bacon Bits]

There are dozens of document management and document version control systems, and many enterprise content management systems have document management as a component. The most well known is probably Microsoft SharePoint, but there are open source alternatives like LogicalDOC, OpenKM, Plone, Nuxeo, Alfresco, etc. as well as other commercial offerings like IBM Enterprise Content Management and others.

However, the technology won't replace poor training or users determined to do their own thing.

Re:Use GIT

[DarkDust]

I've been using SubVersion since it was in beta and have used it at work and in private in multi-gigabyte projects. SubVersion was always rock-solid for us, and it's handling binary files very well (which was the prime reason we decided to switch use SVN back then in about 2003). Git is an excellent tool for us developers, but I feel it's way too complicated for non-technical people who don't need these bells and whistles.

This can help

[fyngyrz]

One decidedly low-tech thing that can be done without any other changes is to have your users start saving documents with sortable times in the filenames, updated as to the time they are doing the save:

client1-document-20150217114003.doc

YYYYmmDDhhMMss

If that's done with a save-as, they get the previous version safety they seem to like just by using "save as" intelligently, and they get latest version sorted using just alpha sort, so it cuts down on the confusion factor.

It isn't much effort, but it's surprisingly effective.

Re:This can help

[znrt]

doesn't solve concurrent edits = you have no single source of information = you can't just pick the last.

i don't think their problem is solvable just with tools. they need to understand collaborative workflow: you either block or are prepared to merge often. i don't know of any such tool that doesn't require a minimum of training and thought. i've heard microsoft claims to have such thing in office 365. and i wouldn't recommend ms to my worst enemy but since it looks like they are on the hook anyway they may as well get raped to the end, won't hurt that much more.

another radical alternative is google docs. yes, sheesh, but better than office.

Re:Backup?

[pahles]

Which is not a version control system at all. Time Machine does periodic backup once per hour, and only once per hour. Not on each save. Not multi-user. No mod points for you.

Microsoft SharePoint

[KermodeBear]

I know that Microsoft products aren't hipster and all, but the OP mentioned Word and Excel documents. SharePoint supports version control. I don't know how well it works for scanned images, but for documents and spreadsheets it works just fine.

ownCloud

[Anonymous Coward]

ownCloud(https://owncloud.org/) supports versioning and will automatically sync changes. It's easy to set up on your own server.