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How do you deal with changing document versions?

9 pointsby rashidujangalmost 7 years ago
At my company, the functional specification documents of the system is kept in a server where new additions to said documentation would result in a new version of the document being uploaded with a 1.x version being incrementally added to the file name. This results in a messy folder structure and redundancy.<p>However, most of the people who need the documentation aren&#x27;t developers nor necessarily even that tech-savvy.<p>What are some ways similar problems are combated in your own workplaces?

6 comments

acutesoftwarealmost 7 years ago
Any sort of versioned online wiki tool is better than word documents with filenames - this can be your own wiki, or sharepoint or Drive.<p>Non tech savvy users can read the page to see the latest version, and others can track through history if they need to.<p>We&#x27;ve had success doing smaller projects completely on trello, though it isnt really a wiki tool, you can force it by having a single top level card with all the feauture requests linking to individual cards to see the progress.
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JanisLalmost 7 years ago
If a document is super important we make sure that it&#x27;s only worked on in a system that support some form of version control. But that&#x27;s fairly easy for us because we pretty much all are comfortable with Git. In the cases where people simply won&#x27;t learn Git I find going with some sort of web-based version controlled documents is a massive win.<p>Whatever you do avoid situations where people email around attached documents with various changes, set strong expectations that emails like that are not to be used. Most of the troubles I&#x27;ve encountered have been because of the inevitable merge conflicts and associated hassles from divergent documents that occur with email attachments.
matt_the_bassalmost 7 years ago
We use git for all our code and svn for our electrical design files. These work reasonably well for engineers but not for non-engineers (sales, marketing, admin, corporate). We tried using svn with word processing files (word and open office). This generally sucked.<p>So we’re tryig something new: google docs. Recently we migrated our file server to google drive and have been moving from open office to google docs.<p>Google docs works great for light weight version control of non-engineering documents. Just name a revision as x.x.x and only distribute named revisions. This obviously only works for documents with a single “branch” but for 99.9% of our non-engineering version control needs, this works GREAT!
digikataalmost 7 years ago
If you just need a little duct tape hack for your situation, you can setup a script to scan the folder and point some html page of links to your latest doc set. Could even as simple as a generated static html file named to appear at the top of the folder or folder tree in a known place.<p>Communicating and agreeing on some commonly understood system is typically a more effective factor than the tooling.
executesorder66almost 7 years ago
We use Confluence [0]<p>If you can&#x27;t afford the license, I think any self hosted wiki software will do the trick. Try [1]<p>Using Word documents is terrible for various reasons.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;confluence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;confluence</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mediawiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MediaWiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mediawiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MediaWiki</a>
dirkthemanalmost 7 years ago
I guess you could find some way to convert Word documents to Markdown and keep version control using Git, but for non-tech-savvy users I assume that&#x27;s going to be a problem...
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