RE: document versioning

[Maritza van den Heuvel <MaritzaV -at- stt-global -dot- com>]

Hi Tim,

FWIW, I do all my technical documentation in the single-sourcing tool
AuthorIT, which has built-in version control on all its objects (this
includes file objects, styles, templates, media, content topics etc.). I
only publish to Word/HTML Help/WinHElp as needed, so all my version history
on content edits is maintained in AuthorIT itself. 

On our development side, though, Visual SourceSafe is used for code
versioning, and I generally check my final published versions in and out of
VSS to synchronize with their builds. This is not ideal, since there are
numerous known issues regarding VSS and especially Word (there's a whole
issue surrounding fast-saves not being picked up by VSS 6.0). I just do it
that way to keep development happy. ;-) It's also an easy way to ensure a
central repository for final documentation. If they weren't already using
VSS for code versioning, I could just as easily use a central network
location for my published versions.

HTH

Maritza

***

Maritza van den Heuvel
Technical Writer

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-----Original Message-----
From: siteadmin -at- word-builder -dot- com [mailto:siteadmin -at- word-builder -dot- com] 
Sent: 21 January 2004 09:50
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: document versioning



I'm wondering what sort of document versioning software writers might be
using to control versions of files. I know MS Word has a built in
verisioning component, though I would like to know if ordinary word
processing lend them selves to something like concurrent versioning system
(CVS) that many software developers use in their shops. A file system based
versioning system of the sort used by software developers allows programmers
and engineers to merge work they collaborate on. The same type of system
would be very useful in word processing. Does anyone know of any such
systems employed in this way in technical documentation development?

Thanks much

Tim Stalker

Word-Builder Precision Communications - www.word-builder.com