RE: How to version a document? (take II)

["Jessica Weissman" <Jessica -dot- Weissman -at- hillcrestlabs -dot- com>]

We work in Microsoft Word.  Documents get a title such as "ThingDoc
Release 1.1 User Guide", which is the document title and the stem of the
file name.

We use Word custom document properties for a document number (assigned
by the same system that assigns part numbers in Engineering), a version
number for the document that starts at 0.1 for unreleased documents, and
an official document date that changes for each document version.  These
are shown on the document title page.

The document file name has the version number appended, so we have
successive versions in files named:

ThingDoc Release 1.1 User Guide rev 0.1.doc
ThingDoc Release 1.1 User Guide rev 0.2.doc
ThingDoc Release 1.1 User Guide rev 1.0.doc
ThingDoc Release 1.1 User Guide rev 1.2.doc
ThingDoc Release 1.1 User Guide rev 2.0.doc

And so on.  I get to decide when the document revision merits a minor
version number change and when it merits a major version number change.
The developers decide what the release number of the software is.

Headers include a short version of the document title and the document
version number.

We keep our documents in a version management system, but the scheme
outlined above works even if you just put things in regular directories.

A few documents are created in Help&Manual, but we use a similar set of
document titles and version numbers that are shown in all outputs.

-  Jessica


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