Document control solutions

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

     Joe Miller helped me answer Dan Lewis' questions:

     "Could Melissa or anyone please explain the difficulty referred to in
     'except designed for binary files'?...What are the difficulties
     associated with using SourceSafe for binary files?"

     by saying:

     "As I understand it, Dan, SourceSafe saves programming code changes by
     saving only the changed lines. A text file that has a change in one
     line will probably cause the remainder of the lines in the paragraph
     to change. More than that, inserting a new paragraph will cause _all_
     of the lines from that point to the end of the doc to be seen as
     changed (because the line numbering has changed), when in fact they
     have not.  This can lead to massive confusion and chaos, which is why
     we decided not to use SourceSafe."

     ...which may be a partial explanation for the specific problems we
     experienced using PVCS. We did some testing (always a good thing) on
     copies of our existing document files before deciding on ANY product.
     We experienced corrupted files when we tried to do merges and
     rollbacks using PVCS on MS Word documents (because of the types of
     documents I maintain, it is important that a document management
     system provide these two functions). I also had a difficult time
     learning to use PVCS (which may just be a user deficiency ;->). We
     decided to go with a product that was easier to use, cheaper, and more
     document-centric than PVCS. Revision Master met our needs, but several
     other good recommendations have been made on-list recently as well. In
     any event, definitely TEST some of your documents with any document
     control tool before making any decisions.

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

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