Opinions on FrameMaker Content Management Systems

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 17:47:49 -0500, "Randall C. Reed" <randall.reed at forceprotection.net> wrote:

>I am curious to see if there is any consensus from Framers as to the
>preferred Component Content Management system or Source Control system
>for a small-to-medium publications department in a small-to-medium
>company running FrameMaker 7.2 on a shared network in an IT environment
>that is SQL-centric. Should we be thinking "little ball" (Visual Source
>Safe) or "big ball" (enterprise content management)? Any opinions
>welcome.

We'd suggest "free ball", CVS or Subversion.  These are
not CMS systems, just SCCS, but they do fine for most uses.
You are probably better off checking in binaries (perhaps 
zipped), then doing any compares in Frame itself rather
than using the SCCS compare, which is really not meant for
applications like Frame that make little changes everywhere.

If you do want to use MIF with the SCCS anyway, we built in
support for that in Mif2Go, for ourselves when we tried it.
It works fine in the free demo version, no license needed:
  http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm
Basically, it saves the MIF is such a way that you can use
it directly in your regular Frame directories if you ever
need to restore it, something not possible with Frame's
native SaveAs.  But we dropped the idea after a few months,
because of excessive archive storage demands (especially
for generated files like the IX, with thousands of changes
for every revision) and went to storing the binaries in CVS 
instead.

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/