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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: "Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Paul Pehrson" <paulpehrson -at- gmail -dot- com>, "List,Techwriter" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:37:00 +0530

Thank you, Paul, for a great idea!

At the time we started on this project, Microsoft hadn't yet caved in
to demand and announced that they would be offering the ODF converter
plugin. However:
1. We're actually using Word 2000 for this project.

2. The client's team (who are actually software engineers doubling as
TWs) have (as I was informed) substantial inertia towards learning new
tools - for example, the GIMP for handling their
screenshot-and-layered-callouts requirement (or even Photoshop, for
that matter - the inertia is apparently against learning curves, not
OSS per se). They had insisted that they would continue to use Word
2000, which they are familiar with.

3. Their software is capable of a high level of customization, which
means UI screenshots included with these manuals need to be replaced
with shots of the post-customization UI by IT staff at /their/
customers' site. Multiple customers for their product means that there
is a sizeable downstream from our client who are now settled on Word's
.doc file format.

Though the client said they'd stick with 2000, they /may/ be willing
to upgrade to Office 2003 if it offers a better SCCS solution. And
since we've been working in 2000 all this time, the docs are
guaranteed not to have any 2003-specific features - so our clients'
downstream shouldn't have problems working with documents saved as
.doc and passed on to them, even though our clients may store them in
OpenXML/ODF for their source control purposes.

Brilliant! This seems to be practically my solution, provided the
client is willing to go for it.
Many thanks, Paul!

Regards,
Ed.

On 7/11/06, Paul Pehrson <paulpehrson -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

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

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