Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 03:44  PM, Joey Carr wrote:

> Ick... SourceSafe is a blight.  It's worse than Windows, if that's
> possible.  For Windows environments where CVS just won't do (because 
> your
> users are afraid of a command line interface) I'd recommend StarTeam.
> See starbase.com. It's proprietary, and I've gotten better support
> occasionally, but all in all it's a good deal and very usable for
> non-technical personnel.  If most of your problem is content management
> they've got this thing called "StarDisk" that connects to the StarTeam
> server and looks like a network mounted file system.  It's very easy 
> for
> tech-writers to grasp the whole thing.  CVS, on the other hand, is much
> better, but suffers from "command lines are hard" inhibitions.

I have a little experience with version control, having been on a team 
writing a custom cross-platform version management system for Sony back 
in '91, been a release engineer on a major operating system in '88, and 
used pretty much every version control system available since then.

I've heard good things about StarTeam. ABB paid a programmer to do a 3 
month study of version control systems and after an exhaustive study he 
picked StarTeam. (Of course this wasn't the package eventually picked, 
but at least they asked.)

My personal favorite in terms of version control for software are two 
programs written by the same person. TeamWare, which is used by Sun to 
release Solaris, and BitKeeper, which is used to manage Linux kernel 
development, are the only two programs which manage releases rather 
than files. (There was a nice article about their particular approach 
in IEEE Software recently.)

The problem with these systems is they are targeted at software and 
source code, which from my experience with Sony just doesn't work well 
for business document management. Source code systems have most of 
their features targeted at all the things programmers would want, and 
none of the things you'd want if you were managing generic projects, or 
worse yet, a whole company's worth of documents. There's gotta be 
something better for non-programming related version control, and 
www.groove.net looks like its a step in the right direction.


___________________________________________________________________
The only good composer is a dead composer.
        -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC