Re: Simultaneous Author Access to files [Cross-posted to HATT And Tec hwr-L]

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch>]

John,

you are not asking for the holy grail here, but you are asking for 
biiig problems. It has been quite a long time fundamental of 
networking and document managing to give _write_ access to one and 
only one user (read access is OK, as reading does not modify a 
document).

Imagine, your five writers makes changes on a file, and all have 
write access to the document. Now, also imagine that every one 
changes the same sentence. So, which one will now be in the document 
when you read it afterwards. OK, all writers changing the same 
sentence may be a bit esoteric, but if every writer changes a 
different paragraph, it would always be the version which gets saved 
last which becomes available. And this one will not have the four 
other changed paragraphs.

So, there is a bit a workflow problem. Actually, it would be much 
better to give the _editing_ responsibility to one writer, who then 
will process all the comments. If this is actually not possible, for 
whatever reasons, it would be a good idea to look at the documents 
and to chop them up into units for which one single writer has the 
responsibility. If that too is not possible, you would have to put 
your documentation into a database where again the logical units 
would have to be made much smaller, so that there will be no need for 
concurrent write access (also, a database would make available the 
write permission to a record as soon as the writer has left that 
particular record).

Hope, this can help.


Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
http://www.prodok.ch



[ Building Bridges for Information ]


______________________






I have five writers in my group, and we're constantly tripping each other up
when we try to access our files for updating. Currently we're using Word 97
(Word 2000 just doesn't cut it) and ForeHelp. Neither of these tools lets us
work efficiently as a group since only one person can have read/write access
to any one file at a time.

Are there ANY tools and/or Document Management Systems that will let us have
free rein to open and edit whatever needs editing, regardless of whether
someone else is using it or not? Or am I asking for the Holy Grail here?

Thanks ... and I'd also like to hear how many of you are running into the
same problem. If it's a big deal, perhaps the tool vendors will take notice
and add more DMS capabilities to their applications.


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