Document Management for Small Company

November 5, 2009 3:10 PM

Document Management Software? I work in a small (less than 10 ppl) company. We all save documents to a common drive. Of late, this has become a problem because we have multiple people working on different versions of the same document. So for Example person A may save a document to the common drive and also send copies of the document to persons B and C to review. B and C will make their edits save the edited documents to the common drive. It's gotten to the point where no one can locate the latest version of a document or find the copy of the document they were working on. When it's time to present a document, no one knows which document is the latest version. We've tried saving documents with initials and the date, but that hasn't worked. Any software or system recommendations to solve this problem would be much appreciated. Thanks.
posted by bananafish to work & money (17 comments total)

Google docs?
posted by dfriedman at 3:13 PM on November 5 [2 favorites has favorites]

Couldn't you use Sharepoint?

I seem to recall that Exchange Server has some sort of version tracking function - you can track the edits of documents in a particular folder.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:14 PM on November 5

Software alone isn't going to solve your problem.

Your biggest issue at the moment is one of concurrency - multiple people working on the same doc at the same time.

You need to figure out your process workflow so that when one person is working on the doc, noone else can make changes - And ideally, forces the next person to work on it to start from the last revision saved.

Revision management systems abound, I'm sure you'll get a ton of suggestions on this one - a big issue will be your budget, as you are a smaller company.

Google Docs is a good cheap solution, if you can work with the limited subset of MSWord functionality that it provides. It has the added benefit of allowing multiple people to work on the doc at the same time (everyone sees the changes eachother makes).

Good luck!
posted by swngnmonk at 3:24 PM on November 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

At my job, we consistently ran into "version problems" with our files. The best non-software solution that we adapted utilized version numbers (i.e. XYZFile_v24). Then, if someone was working in the latest draft, a team member would open the file as read-only, saving the new version as a "rider" (i.e. XYZFile_v24_Jim_Rider.xls). Then, once the main version was available, the person working in the rider could copy in any changes that they made to the file in the latest version (presumably v25). Generally, and this may be obvious, I always found the quickest way to determine the latest file would just be to sort the folder by 'date modified'--it's a bit of a shortcut, but was still useful...
posted by arm426 at 3:25 PM on November 5

Alfresco Community Edition is free and pretty great, but you'll need a server to run it on, as well as the proper backend to make sure everything is available and backed up.
posted by tracert at 3:28 PM on November 5 [2 favorites has favorites]

I've implemented KnowledgeTree for a company about your size and it worked really well for them. They have an open source, free edition that does a good job with file versions. It might be a bit more complex than you are after, but if you implement something like it now, if you grow it would be more and more useful.
posted by meta87 at 3:32 PM on November 5 [3 favorites has favorites]

You need to figure out your process...
Yup. See if you can develop a simple process, then document it - in a visio diagram, on a whiteboard, anywhere all the users can refer to it.
Use it for a while, improve it, lather, rinse, repeat.
I'd also say that as a starting point in your process, you'll need to determine who "owns" the document - who is responsible/accountable for making sure that the copy that goes to the presentation or meeting is the right version.
I've worked with different software packages (Siemens, VSS, homegrown) that version docs for you and require check-in/check-out, but before you can use any of them successfully, you'll need a defined, working process. Once you have that process, you may find that software is overkill, and not worth the expense.
posted by dbmcd at 4:01 PM on November 5

Google docs.
posted by Jairus at 4:47 PM on November 5

Are the documents printed? If not, a wiki is also a good repository.
posted by holloway at 4:51 PM on November 5

the problem here isn't necessarily software, it's people and process. you don't save a doc to a common folder and then send out copies for people to work on and then save their copies of to the same common folder. that creates redundancy and the problems you're running into. either one person "owns" the document on the common drive (and collects everyone's changes and inputs them on the master copy), or else everyone makes all their changes to that document (using track changes or whatever) and if that doc is locked because someone else is using it, person b makes their changes another time.

with a company as small as yours, this shouldn't be too much of a problem. i think it's just a matter of each document needs to be "owned" by someone and that person needs to make sure the right version is there for the presentation, etc.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 5:00 PM on November 5 [1 favorite has favorites]

A bit different but look at Etherpad.
posted by sammyo at 5:33 PM on November 5

As holloway mentioned, a wiki might be a good option for you, depending on the type of documents that are being edited. There was a really good post on LifeHacker recently about using MediaWiki to write a book collaboratively.
posted by webhund at 6:23 PM on November 5

I've seen people use revision control/source control management systems^* to solve this problem. Basically, you have a blessed, central repository of documents, and you have your own local copy that you can modify to your heart's content. You then are able to upload your copy ("commit" it) to the central repository, replacing what's already there. If your system understands the file format you work in, then you get the added benefit of it being able to show all the differences between versions. (This is fairly unlikely with Word or Powerpoint, unfortunately. These systems are designed with flat text files in mind.) If not, it just knows that they're different. This is basically what you're doing now, using software that automates the process.

Of course, this requires that everyone be familiar with the revision control program you use, and may be too much of a technical hurdle to overcome. It's something worth considering if you have a technically savvy crowd.

* Such as git or subversion -- I prefer git, but svn has better integration with Windows.
posted by kdar at 9:52 PM on November 5

Seconding KnowledgeTree or Alfresco. I wouldn't give all my company documents to Google.
posted by devnull at 12:06 AM on November 6

At my job, we consistently ran into "version problems" with our files. The best non-software solution that we adapted utilized version numbers (i.e. XYZFile_v24). Then, if someone was working in the latest draft, a team member would open the file as read-only, saving the new version as a "rider" (i.e. XYZFile_v24_Jim_Rider.xls)

This is how we do it. Each new draft of a document has the version number in the filename incremented, and when a person (who isn't the primary author) makes changes, they append their initials to it.

So we'd have:

• SalesProjections_Draft01.doc, which is the first draft created by the author.
• SalesProjections_Draft01_js.doc, which contains John Smith's revisions to Draft01.
• SalesProjections_Draft01_ks.doc, which contains Karen Smith's revisions to Draft01.
• SalesProjections_Draft02.doc, which is the second draft (presumably incorporating everyone's changes to Draft01).

... and so on. Note that including a leading zero for single-digit revisions maintains proper sorting (by name, which is the Windows default) when you go over 10 revisions to the document (i.e., Draft09 comes before Draft10, but Draft9 would go after Draft10 in an alphabetically-sorted list).

It's a bit kludgy, but free, and it's a relatively painless way to get some control over document versioning without having to get everyone up to speed on using some third-party software. Yes, it's going to take a bit of getting used to, but there's much less of a learning curve this way -- plus the extent to which the policy is being adhered to can be easily monitored on a day-to-day basis.

And as mentioned above, you have to get people in the habit of saying "the document is on the P: drive for your review" instead of emailing the file.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 4:50 AM on November 6

If you are in a legal office, Interwoven will solve this problem.
posted by Sheppagus at 2:11 PM on November 6

Everyone who's used a revision control system hates it. Most software engineers learn exactly enough about the RCS they're forced to use to avoid losing their jobs. Making lawyers use an RCS would be delightfully entertaining in a Toonces the Driving Cat kind of way, but it is not what you want.

I've used MS Sharepoint at a previous job, and it was widely hated, although not as much as the revision control system. I found it cumbersome to use. If it solves your problem, it might not be a totally unreasonable choice since you already us MS exchange.

Wikis are good for sharing information, but you'll never import a word doc into one. Also, you'll have to learn Wiki syntax.

I use Google Docs every day, and it is functional but has bizarre user interface problems. I hate it less than MS Sharepoint. Your MS Word documents will be eaten, digested, and pooped out in fanciful variations; as a lawyer, you're probably a stickler for getting out what you put in, so this may not fly. They store your data for you "in the cloud", so I guess you have to worry about what happens if they get a subpoena (read section 8).

MS has announced that MS Office 2010 will include collaboration features. Whether it will work adequatelyy for you is unknown (MS Visual Sourcesafe was their revision control system, and it's the worst one ever made by anyone ever, failing in wonderfully comical ways). You could wait and pray. I don't know if it'll be in the cloud in which case you'd have the same subpoena issue as with Google Docs.

A solution that is not "in the cloud" will require some amount of IT support when it breaks. Whatever you pick, make sure you can get your data back out when the company that makes your software goes out of business or becomes evil.
posted by jewzilla at 12:43 AM on November 17