[ILUG] Document Management

[Hunt, Bryan]

If you want a free code/document management system try using cvs on the
server and wincvs 
(wincvs.org)on the users windows machines.

--B


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Moen [mailto:rick at linuxmafia.com]
Sent: 20 February 2002 17:05
To: Gavin Henrick
Cc: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] Document Management


Quoting Gavin Henrick (gavin at diva.ie):

> What Document Management Software options exist for Linux?
> 
> Client has mainly windows client machines on small network, needing 
> shared document management, preferably on a linux server (which is his 
> gateway)

So, I assume by "document management software", you mean version
control / change management.

Most people using MS-Windows desktop operating systems in business give
only lip service to version control.  In consequence, they generate and
store crucial business data in fragile, often auto-corrupting secret
binary formats.  The semantics of that data are, of course, not readily
available other than to the software that created the files, so you
can't easily get meaningful diff information (not even when using, e.g.,
Microsoft Visual Source Safe to store Microsoft-generated data files).

There are, however, companies that develop support for that semantics,
for document storage systems, under NDA with the application vendors.
You might want to talk, for example, to Oracle Corporation -- and expect
to pay very dearly for what they offer in that area.

A business that had intelligently anticipated the problem of version
control, and long-term access to stored data, might have standardised on
marked-up text formats instead of secret binary ones -- e.g., TeX or
DocBook for the canonical versions of formatted text documents.  Those
formats (and similar ones for other types of data) are both long-term
stable and amenable to version control.  They would be used for the
"upstream" master versions, which can then be used to generate MS-Word,
PDF, and other versions for general usage.

But it would be a rare business that was that careful, and actually
bothered to implement a coherent document policy.  Instead, you
typically get a non-policy, which the IS Department is then expected to
render reliable, retroactively.

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