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

Business problem != technology problem

[Maxwell]

Throwing more technology on the pile won't help without a lot of user education, and if you had that you would not need the technology anyway...

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.

Business problem != technology problem

[rgbe]

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.

Document Management System

[kdekorte]

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.

Don't forget the people side of the equation

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

You are asking the wrong queston...

[bobbied]

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...