We are using WSS 3.0 at work to manage design documents for our systems. We work in a parallel environment which means we usually have a production copy of a document (e.g Doc A) plus also two or more versions of that document that will be worked on by independent project teams (Doc A (proj 1) & Doc A (proj 2)), we have in the past achieved this by keeping the documents in seperate site collections, however this is very messy and over time has become extremely hard to keep track of the latest versions.
What I am trying to achieve is to store all versions of Doc A in the same document library keeping the name the same but distinguish the different versions of the document using meta-data fields so that users will be able to view the production version of the document while proj 1 and proj 2 can work on their documents seperately. Each individual version of the document must also be searchable using the WSS search.
E.g Name Project Name Doc A Production Doc A Proj 1 Doc A Proj 2
I have thought about simply using version control in the library to maintain the different versions of the document and allow the users to simply go to version history to choose which document they want to view or work on. The issue with this approach is that I can not get the seperate version of the document to show up in the search results.
I am stuck with WSS 3.0 for at least another 12 months, so my solution has to be WSS 3.0 based.
Has anyone had experience trying to implement something similar and if so what was the solution that you used? I can't imagine that I am the only one trying to cater for a paraelle development environment.