Document revision control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Amy,

I strongly recommend subversion considering that you are such a small team,
especially compared to the other options. In the end, it does ultimately
come down to your use case, so it in some sense depends.

--Perforce: have not used this personally but i believe its a high learning
curve and will cost money....how much i don't know.

--Sharepoint: I would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. It seems like I
see a post at least once a week from some writer complaining about how the
integration is not working as expected. They usually are complaining about
how check in and check outs are not functioning, which is a really bad
sign. Plus, you have to license and maintain a sharepoint site. And then
you as a tech writer have to be burdened with sharepoint in order to handle
some of the  most basic tasks.

--Documentum: Okay here's the thing. It costs like 200 thousand dollars.  I
think that's an insane amount of money to charge for a content management
system that technical writers need. I could only see that being a
consideration if you had a team of like 50 writers or something massive.


---Subversion: Its basically free. You just have the cost of setting up a
subversion server, which is not that big of a deal. Typically, someone in
your IT department will it do for you.  Plus, there are nice free SVN
clients for doing check ins, check outs, looking at the repository etc.

And here's the awesome thing about this: it just works. There's nothing
complicated about it. I have been using SVN for years now and I have had
almost no problems with it. There are some pros and cons associated with
SVN, which I can go into detail if you want. But i give a big thumbs up to
SVN if I were if you consider the ROI, cost of business, and the fact that
you are talking about only 3 writers.

Joe
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