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

Question

I'm currently working at a small web development company, we mostly do campaign sites and other promotional stuff. For our first year we've been using a "server" for sharing project files, a plain windows machine with a network share. But this isn't exactly future proof.

SVN is great for code (it's what we use now), but I want to have the comfort of versioning (or atleast some form of syncing) for all or most of our files.

What I essentially want is something that does what subversion does for code, but for our documents/psd/pdf files.

I realize subversion handles binary files too, but I feel it might be a bit overkill for our purposes. It doesn't necessarily need all the bells and whistles of a full version control system, but something that that removes the need for incremental naming (Notes_1.23.doc) and lessens the chance of overwriting something by mistake.

It also needs to be multiplatform, handle large files (100 mb+) and be usable by somewhat non technical people.

Answer 1

SVN is great for binaries, too. If you're afraid you can't compare revisions, I can tell you that it is possible for Word docs, using Tortoise.
But I do not know, what you mean with "expanding the versioning". SVN is no document management system.

Edit:

but I feel it might be a bit overkill for our purposes

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

Answer 2

You might want to consider using a Mac as your server and using Time Machine to backup your shared folders. Doing this gives you automatic backups and allows you to share through Samba so everyone can have a network drive on their computer. A Mac server is probably overkill. A Mac Mini would do for a small office or a repurposed desktop machine.

You might also consider Amazon's S3 service to do offline backups. Since it's a pay-as-you-go service this can scale with use, and if you feel you want to move to something else you can always download your data and take it somewhere else.

Answer 3

We've just moved over to Perforce and have been really happy with it. It's a commercial product, but it's so powerful and easy to use that it's worth the price per seat IMHO.

Answer 4

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

It can do version control for documents, and has a 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 metadata in your documents.

Regarding large files, by default the max filesize is 50MB, but it can be configured.

Answer 5

A decent folder structure and naming scheme?

VCS don't really handle images and such very well - would it be possible to have the code in a VCS (SVN/Git/Mercurial etc), along-side a sensible folder structure for the binary-assets (source photos, Photoshop PSD files, Illustrator files and so on)?

It wouldn't handle syncing, but a central file-server would achieve the same thing.

It would require some enforcing and kitten-herding to get people to name things properly, but I think having a version folder for each asset (like someproject/asset/headerlogo/v01/headerlogo_v01.psd) will basically be like a VCS, but easier to move between different revisions (no vcs checkout blah -r 234 when a client decides they prefered v02 more than v03)

Answer 6

Your question is interesting because your specifying that it be suitable for a small office. At the enterprise level, I would recommend something along the line of EMC Documentum's eRoom, but obviously thats going to be way more than you need, and more than you want cost-wise as well. I'm not sure of the licensing details on this but I've heard that if your office has MS Office, you have access to Sharepoint, which might work well for you. I'm also sure there are a lot of SAAS implementations of this kind of stuff, so you may want to look at that, keeping in mind that the servers will not be hosted by you, so if the material is extremely sensitive, thats obviously not the proper route.

Answer 7

Windows Vista features local file versioning in its file system, which can be useful, but is limited in terms of teamwork. However, if somebody overwrites somebody else's file, a new version is stored as it should be.

Answer 8

Also consider KnowledgeTree. Have a look at it, some demos/screenshots are available at http://www.knowledgetree.com/

It has a free open source Community Edition - so it's cost effective. We haven't tried it, but we chose this one over other systems for a small business looking for document versioning solution.