Versioning of content

Hi all

a small question on the topic of versioning. afaik only content (DCR's) that get actively put into an edition are actually beeing versioned?

How do you deal with the business requirement, that people want to work on their document, save it, come back later, work again, save again and the go back to their last version, before they did the second save, if after the save the file was NOT beeing submittet to staging, because it was nowhere near to be approved?

bear in mind that i'm looking here at accountants, clerks and assistants, not professional publishers.

thanks for any input.

Evert

Evert Smit
Business Project Manager
Credit Suisse Group

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Adam Stoller

Create a "development" branch where users can submit work-in-progress files for versioning purposes and then provide a "promotion" scheme which takes the work from the "development" branch and pushes it through a review process in order to get it approved and submitted to a "production" branch.

Then make sure that all [non-reviewer/non-production] users do their work on the "development" branch and train them to submit their work regularly and have a submit workflow that prompts for a checkin message and simply submits the file with that message without going through a review process, and a different workflow for taking pre-selected files and promoting them from development to production by utilizing updatetasks and/or iwupdate to transfer the selected file(s) from the development branch to the production branch after they've been reviewed and approved - and then submit them on the production branch and potentially publish an edition and/or deploy the files, etc.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Evert

Hey Gothi,

sounds like the same approach i discussed with henry and david before. It will work fine, but with 500 branches and growing that would get rather large, unless you would take subbranches and make it therefor more manageable.

On our side we use an external editor, i.e are able to trigger additional events outside the regular teamsite functions. i was thinking on the line of a CVS that would recieve a version of the DCR everytime it is saved, and we could easily retrieve dcr's from it again, if we want to go to an older version, without having to run multiple branches. My question is rather from a busines perspective. Is it a demand people have or is it something specific in the environment we work in.

i know the CVS idea might seem redundant, otoh teamside don't offer this direct submit, commit, update and diff feature on a API or CLI level.

regards
Evert

Evert Smit
Business Project Manager
Credit Suisse Group

Adam Stoller

(it's ghoti not gothi)

I can think of a number of ways to deal with this - one being the use of sub-branches for "development" work - another one being the use of different submit workflow processes and the use of EAs on the files to indicate whether they are being submitted for checkpointing or for actual use on the site - a lot depends on other aspects of the environment, how content is previewed, etc. David and the other folks at Quotient who've been involved at your site will have a lot better understanding of the environment and how either of these approaches (or a variant thereof) would work for you and/or what it would take to implement.

My comments here are on the theoretical level which may or may not work in your environment; or may or may not require signficant development to make them work in your environment.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

gzevin

Evert,

another thing is that you are talking about document management, not the content management, and, as such, I believe, you should look at different product offering.. even WorkSite, for example.. hm.. I just did an IWOV sales trick..

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

Evert

well i got exactly what i wantet, a neutral best practice approach, gving me an idea on how things can be done. it was after all what i was asking for Smiley Happy

Evert Smit
Business Project Manager
Credit Suisse Group

Evert

indeed, it is a form of document management, then again, what is the difference between content management and document management. in the end i want an improoved versioning of my content, giving the end users a closer feel to what they know from ms office , i.e track changes etc in order to improove the end user acceptance.

the cvs aprroach will work well in our setup for the reason that it is a standard aplication in our environment (believe me, changing that is a tough cookie) and we use a fully detached wysiwyg editor on a perl base. so the updates and commits to cvs could be build in easily because we would not need to touch any TS parts.

hehe if we continue like this, we'll have our own cvs perl based cms, and will wonder what TS actually does for us. The editor we now feature is a blast. fantastic job done by the quotient folks.

regards

Evert Smit
Business Project Manager
Credit Suisse Group

gzevin

the ARE differences between the web content and documents (of course, there are similarities as well). But the differences are too obvious to warrant different kind of managment systems.

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU