[DLSLUG-Discuss] Metadot - or Other Ideas

[James Fogg]

> Hello there,
> 
> I'm just curious.
> Does SharePoint collaboration and file sharing work like SourceSafe?
> 
> Does SharePoint allow more than one user to save changes to a 
> Word or Excel file unwittingly. Does SharePoint keep track of 
> who made what changes? Does it try to merge the changes?
> 
> Would "Google Docs & Spreadsheets" have those same features?
> 
> -Roger


Concurrent Versions System -CVS- (and Microsoft's Horrible SourceSafe
CVS clone) provide a lot of versioning controls and benefits, including
tracking changes and merging deltas. They are for true "concurrent
versions" of documents.

Things like Sharepoint and Google D&S solve the problem by eliminating
the "concurrent". There are no multiple copies floating around that have
to be reconciled with each other and have deltas merged. They do
introduce a race condition if two people are editing simultaneously. And
Sharepoint doesn't prevent you from downloading the document and
creating a concurrency problem and it cannot address concurrency.

Some things demand concurrency, especially source code, which will need
to be compiled locally and run to test. Other documents, like a vacation
schedule, demand that a single trusted version exist and don't require
any resources of your local machine.

SourceSafe and Visual SourceSafe have a lot of limitations that make
them a poor choice, use CVS if you can.