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Re: What's a good versioning system for Office documents?

Subject: Re: What's a good versioning system for Office documents?
From: "Paul Pehrson" <paulpehrson -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:26:13 -0600

I'm wondering if you've considered saving your files in a non-MS format?

If you were to save your documents in an XML format, then you could
still check them in to a source control and have only the diffs
stored, instead of storing the binary .doc files.

Recent versions of MS Word allow you to save documents in XML formats;
I even read recently that in the next version of MS Word, MS will
support the open-document format used by OpenOffice, StarOffice, and
others (through an optional, free, plug-in).

Good luck finding a solution that works for you.

Paul Pehrson


On 7/11/06, Edgar D' Souza <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

Thanks for the reply, Al.
This might not meet our requirements, though. What we're looking for
is a solution for a team of tech writers, who may choose to check out
one or more documents from the source-control repository to work on
them. If even one of the team members telecommutes or is otherwise
geographically distant from the others, control of who has the latest
version of which document becomes a major issue.
I should clarify here and state that for this project, the client has
had us split up monolithic single-file manuals into multiple chapter
files; several chapters will be shared between manuals, since they're
pretty identical. As an aside, the clients are also looking at
purchasing a conditional text plugin like Livelinx
(http://livelinx.com/contentmanagement/conditional-text.html ) to
maintain an even finer control over what content is exposed in each
chapter file - based on which manual it is included into.

This setup will cause enough complexity that using Word's own
versioning will probably help make a big mess of things if one person
slips up on the coordinated handling of the docs. That's why a
centralized Source Control system seemed like a good idea, since it
would at the very least make sure nobody would mistakenly begin
editing a file someone else was still working on.

It's beginning to look like there *is* no such animal, either in the
Microsoft stable, or out. Which means we could just as well plump for
any SCCS system out there, and use it as a file-lock tool.

Regards,
Ed.
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Follow-Ups:

References:
What's a good versioning system for Office documents?: From: Edgar D' Souza
Re: What's a good versioning system for Office documents?: From: alackerson
Re: What's a good versioning system for Office documents?: From: Edgar D' Souza

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