Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
1) Create a rational naming convention and use that.
Or
2) use Sharepoint's (base version is free beer) built in versioning system. That is what it is designed for and is one of the few things that SP does well.
I agree it's a business problem. MS Office has some pretty good versioning support built into it and multiple people can edit a document at the same time, if you know how to set it up. There should a technical person in your wife's company that understands how MS Office and other tools work. They should train the staff on the capabilities and the staff should come up with a process that works for everyone.
With SharePoint you can have MS Office documents versioned, it is basic versioning, not like git where you can have branches and things like that. For other types of documents, it's a matter of defining a process and naming convention on how to keep a track of items.
What you are looking for is a Document Management System, something like Documentum or FileNet that are built for this specific version and include additional features like workflow and extra attributes that you can add to the content to find it easier. Web Content Management systems are not the same thing, and will not work the way you want them to so make sure you look at all the options out there.
The greatest document version control solution will ultimately prove to be useless without considering the human, i.e. user, part of the solution. Unless you have clear procedures in place detailing how to maintain version control, teach people how to use the software, explain to them why version control is important (and yes that means you, Mr or Ms senior executive who doesn't have time or the need to follow procedures that are in place to prevent the last screwup you caused by ignoring them), and have someone who maintains the document library and keeps it in shape so it actually is easy to use, your solution will fail. Without that, people will download the latest, make edits, save a copy and upload the edited version. After a while they will simply edit the saved copy and, if you're lucky, upload it as a new document.Others will download a document, make edits, save a copy and send it out without ever checking the document back in so no one else can edit it; those people will find an older version and simply edit it.
I've been there and seen it done very poorly and very well; the key difference is those who do it well have someone who knows how to make it work, can educate people and convince them why it is important, and actually make it work. Those where it fails simply put in a technology solution and then wonder why it didn't works they search for the next technology solution.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The problem you have is a "process" problem. If everybody is editing documents all over the place at the same time on shared drives, you simply cannot avoid the *real* problem and that is a process one. CVS or RCS, or any other "version control system" cannot fix the process problem.
You need to think about why the "process" allows multiple people to be editing the same document at the same time. If you continue to allow this practice, your issue becomes a question of "how to merge" all this input back into ONE document. Unfortunately, Merging is pretty much *always* guaranteed to be a hard problem, especially when you are merging things that are complex in structure. Source code is bad enough, but you are dealing with stuff that most revision control systems just store as binary blobs and can usually only tell you that copy x is different than copy y, but not what the changes actually are.
So, your FIRST responsibility here is to solve the problem with your process that leads to multiple editors having the file open at once and pare that down to the minimum number of editors you can (hopefully ONE at a time) and then deal with the difficult merge task that's left. I'll warn you that you may need to enforce the process using file permissions, only giving limited people write access to the file on the share so only they can change it. Everybody else has to go though them.
THEN, you can implement just about ANY revision management system you want, or if your access controls are well enough established, just keep everything on a common share that everybody can read, but only by going though the process can they change things... If you *must* have revision management, go with something that can parse the internal changes of the files you store as much as possible. For Office documents, I would assume Microsoft has tools for that, beyond just sharepoint...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
LOL. I was going to say Perforce too. But as a joke!
I'm sure these teachers will love the process for creating "changesets" before they can check in any documents. Perforce is awesome, but not really for laymen.
Some businesses are not comfortable putting their documents in the hands of another party due to security concerns. Some also are hesitant to rely on a service that may go away with relatively short notice.
Google Docs would require additional training as well if they are already using Word/Excel and legacy documents would need to be maintained somewhere.
Google Docs does not import a lot of Word and Excel documents adequately. I've rarely had it import a Word document with sufficient fidelity that I didn't find it necessary to at least touch it up. With Excel documents, I almost always have to do a lot more than "touch up" work to make it whole again. Therefore, it's likely switching to Google Docs would require a lot of effort if some of these documents are "living" documents that change from time to time.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Git and SVN are different products. SVN is centralized and git is distributed. If you want to create a centralized repository and only allow people to have access to certain parts of it, SVN is a much better fit for that workflow. Neither allows the user to browse the document repository with first checking it out. Well, they both have web interfaces, but those don't support a good editing workflow.
This is a terrible idea.
a) in practice people will make typos on the 14 char datetime string, miss leading zeroes etc.. resulting in a mess of similarly named files in the folder
b) even if miraculously this format was followed rigorously by the users for every file, you'd still have people forgetting to sort the directory files by time (or thinking it is sorted when it isn't) and opening the wrong file etc
Timestamping files with a 14 char string is the kind of thing computers are good at and people are not.
...another radical alternative is google docs. yes, sheesh, but better than office.
My fear is that Google docs has attained the level of usability and popularity that often precedes a Google project, service, or feature being shut down...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office