Re: Document management tools or processes

Subject: Re: Document management tools or processes
From: Tom Johnson <johnsont -at- FREEWAY -dot- NET>
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 09:16:57 -0400

On Sunday, August 02, 1998 5:27 PM, Melissa Lowery
[SMTP:melissa -dot- lowery -at- CAPITALONE -dot- COM] wrote:
> TECHWR-Lers:
>
...
> I need to be able to maintain
> multiple versions for each chunk since I will need to "publish" a
> document version for each server version, even though the same
> document piece may be changed in each of the three releases
currently
> in development.
>
> I need to find a tool or process to help me store and track
revisions
> for these component pieces. One of the A&D team members is really
> pushing hard for me to use PVCS to manage this task.


> I have read on
> this list before that this is not a very good tool for documents
> because it was really designed for source code, not binary files. My
> PVCS administrator here is very much against using it because of the
> file sizes involved and the limited disk space that has been
assigned
> for PVCS on our server. Does anyone have any specific experience
using
> PVCS or some other more appropriate tool to track multiple revisions
> of document components. Unfortunately, price and ease of
installation
> are two factors I have to consider since I do not have unlimited
> resources to do this (i.e. suggesting a tool that costs $10,000 or
> requires a specialist to implement is of no use to me). Any
> suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated. I will be glad to
> summarize all responses to the list. Thanks!
>
> Melissa Lowery
> Technical Writer, Capital One
> melissa -dot- lowery -at- capitalone -dot- com
>
>
Melissa,

What you are describing is what PVCS is designed to do. I'm not a PVCS fan,
but it does what I need it to do so I use it without complaint. PVCS will
indeed handle binary files with some obscure limitations. We use it for
everything from ASCII to FrameMaker and AutoCad.

If your company wants you to track revisions, they are going to have to
give you space to store them. Whether that space is controlled by PVCS or
not shouldn't be an issue. From what I understand, PVCS archives can
actually use less space than storing every revision in its native format.
They do it using by compressing files and only storing enough information
to show what is different with each revision. Taking a look at one of my
files, the file size is 226K and the archive for that file is 741K which
includes six revisions. Storing all six revisions without PVCS could use
nearly twice as much space.

I'm not sure how much PVCS cost per license, but I think it is under $1000
US. Installation isn't difficult, but using PVCS efficiently takes some
effort and thought. You don't need to be a specialist, just willing to get
over the initial hump.

Tom Johnson
Traverse City, MI. Where the air and water are clean.

business johnsont -at- starcutter -dot- com
personal tjohnson -at- grandtraverse -dot- com

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