What is the best way to handle files for a small office?

Question

I currently work in a small website development company, we mainly deal with campaign sites and other promotional materials. During our first year, we used a “server” to exchange project files, a simple window computer with a network resource. But this is not entirely future proof.

SVN is great for code (this is what we use now), but I want you to have comfortable version control (or at least some kind of synchronization) for all or most of our files.

What I really want is what does subversion for the code, but for our documents / psd / pdf files.

I understand that disruptive processing also processes binary files, but I feel this may be a little redundant for our purposes. This is not necessarily all the bells and whistles of a complete version control system, but something that eliminates the need for incremental naming (Notes_1.23.doc) and reduces the chance of overwriting anything by mistake.

It should also be multi-platform, process large files (100 mb +) and be used by some non-technical people.

Answer 1

SVN is great for binary files. If you are afraid that you cannot compare versions, I can tell you that this is possible for Word documents using Tortoise.
But I do not know what you mean by "version extension". SVN is not a document management system.

Edit:

but I feel it might be a little redundant for our purposes

If you are already using SVN, and it suits your goals, why bother with a second system?

Answer 2

If you have a Windows 2003 server, you can take a look at Sharepoint Services 3.0 ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb684453.aspx ).

It can do versioning for documents and has nice integration with Office starting with Office xp, but Office 2003 and 2007 are better. Office and PDF files can be indexed (via Adobe IFilter) and searched. You can also add IFilters to search for metadata in your documents.

For large files, the default maximum file size is 50 MB, but it can be customized.

Answer 3

We switched to Perforce and were very pleased with this. This is a commercial product, but it is so powerful and easy to use that it costs a price per place IMHO.

Answer 4

Decent folder structure and naming scheme?

VCS does not cope with images, and very well - is it possible to have code in VCS (SVN / Git / Mercurial, etc.), and on the side is a reasonable folder structure for binary assets (source photos, Photoshop PSD files, Illustrator files, etc.) .d.)?

It will not handle synchronization, but the central file server will achieve the same.

This will require some coercion and a kitten to get people to name things correctly, but I think having a folder with a version for each asset (e.g. someproject / asset / header_logo / v01 / header_logo_v01.psd) will basically look like VCS, but easier move between different versions (no vcs checkout blah -r 234 when the client decides that they prefer v02 more than v03)

Answer 5

Your question is interesting because you indicated that it is suitable for a small office. At the enterprise level, I would recommend something from the EMC Documentum eRoom line , but obviously this will be more than you need and more than you want to save. I'm not sure about the details of licensing, but I heard that if your office has MS Office, you have access to Sharepoint, which may work for you. I am also sure that there are many SAAS implementations of this kind of thing, so you can look at this, bearing in mind that the servers will not be hosted by you, so if the material is extremely sensitive, this is obviously not the right route.

Answer 6

You might want to use the Mac as your server and Time Machine to back up your shared folders. This gives you automatic backups and allows you to share through Samba so that everyone can have Amazon S3 service for offline backups on their computer. Since this is a pay-as-you-go service, it can be scaled to use, and if you feel that you want to move to something else, you can always upload your data and take it to another location.

Answer 7

Windows Vista supports local file updates on its file system, which may be useful, but limited in terms of teamwork. However, if someone overwrites someone else’s file, the new version is stored as it should.

Answer 8

Also consider KnowledgeTree. Look at this, some demos / screenshots are available at http://www.knowledgetree.com/

It has the free open source Community Edition, so it is cost effective. We did not try this, but we chose this option for other systems for small businesses that are looking for a solution for document versioning.