Re: Visual SourceSafe for Documentation Source Control

[kjng -at- gprotechnologies -dot- com]

Currently I am involved in implementing and documenting a CMMI Quality
Management System (lots of process docs, forms and templates, XLS & DOC).
As tech writer I also continue to develop our help manuals in ROBOHELP
2002,now X5 with VSS integration.

I am currently put our CMMI docs on public file server, and version
control was pretty adhoc, no visual source safe. We have subfolders,
Baseline, Archive and Working. Because it was not controlled by any tool,
relying on my own and team members compliance to procedure, we had our own
'configuration management' issues. Fortunately i was mostly the one
editing it, during inception. But other people ie product managers do
require copies of the templates or forms from time to time. (and this
happened sometimes when I was editing some of the docs), end result
different ppl starting work from different versions of templates and
forms.

See also: Managing Online Help Monster article on the tech writer list for
ideas.

Lesson: In future, it might serve us well, to add all these templates,
process docs and forms into VSS(currently used by developers only and me
for help docs). But that means excluding other non development members in
the org. In retro, with added CMMI knowledge, it also might automate some
of the revision history tracking and control issues with Word, template
docs.It probably still isn't as well implemented.

Currently my help project development is integrated directly into VSS.
Haven't had to recover any topics or pages so far, but i guess i do have
peace of mind that its backed up automatically and different versions of
it are retrievable if i need it.

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