Document control solutions

[Melissa Lowery <melissa -dot- lowery -at- CAPITALONE -dot- COM>]

     John Gilger replied to Cathriona's request for document control
     software suggestions:

     "Word does all of this. See "Track Changes" under the "Tools" menu."

     I sent a message to Cathriona with a recommendation for Revision
     Master from Diehl GraphSoft (which I heard about after posting a
     similar message to this list several months ago). What John may not
     understand is that Word can't do everything that Cathriona needs to
     do. While you can track revisions at a line level in Word, you can't
     really track document versions very well, especially if for some
     reason you need to roll back to a previous version of a document. Word
     also permits multiple copies of a document to exist, so you might end
     up with several different versions of one document if several people
     have made personal copies to work on and merging content can be hell
     in this situation.

     Word also doesn't have very strong password protection as many of us
     have discovered. There are a myriad of ways to circumvent password
     protection in a Word document. Since Cathriona needs something similar
     to the capabilities of SourceSafe, except designed for binary files, a
     tool other than Word needs to be used.

     I had to lobby hard to convince the programmers and analysts I work
     with that we couldn't use PVCS to store our documents as easily as
     they can to store their source files. I gave my suggestion to
     Cathriona. I hope others will as well.

     Melissa Lowery
     melissa -dot- lowery -at- capitalone -dot- com


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