Document/collaboration server advise needed

[James B. Byrne]

On Thu, January 25, 2018 06:15, Frank Leonhardt wrote:

>
> I can give you a pretty good list of systems to AVOID at all costs
> (mostly based on Microsoft standards). I can't actually think of one
> that wasn't painful to use.
>
> For collaborative documentation I've been impressed by the commercial
> Confluence - a very easy-to-use wiki with add-ons. But nothing to do
> with RCS on external document files.
>
> My current fave-rave for "this sort of thing" is Redmine, the base
> and a few modules for which are available in ports. It's written in
> Ruby but don't hold that against it. It's actually easy to set up
> and works very well. It's got a lot of features you don't need (like
> critical path analysis and ticket workflow) but you can turn on/off
> features by project to declutter. And it integrates with pretty much
> any VCS.
>
> Redmine doesn't have all the features you desire, but I don't think
> anything does.
>
> Regards, Frank.
>

We transitioned to Redmine / git from Trac / SVN in March of 2006. 
This has proven to be an exceptionally beneficial decision.  Redmine
has a wealth of features, most of which we do not use but those we do
are very valuable to us.  It supports multiple projects and each
project can have multiple sub-projects.  Likewise each issue can have
sub-issues / dependencies. Each project and sub-project can have its
own VCS repository, or not.  Changes in the linked repository can be
viewed through Redmine.

Git likewise is an amazing tool for tracking changes to source code
and documents.  Git is one of many VCS products integrated into
Redmine and can track changes by issue # generating cross-references
to the Redmine entries.  All git repositories are local but they can
be tied to a remote 'master' repository. When properly configured
commits to git can be made by email or one can push changes made to
ones local repository to the remote over ssh.

A great safety feature is that everyone working on a project
controlled by git has the entire commit history of the repository. 
This makes losing or corrupting the project repository much less
likely. Albeit at the cost of a little more disk space and somewhat
more care when merging changes made by multiple people working on the
same file.

I cannot speak to costing / accounting features in Redmine as that is
not something we do with Redmine.  But time recording in Redmine is
very good.   I would recommend Redmine to anyone requiring project
management tool with fine granularity control.

-- 
***          e-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel          ***
        Do NOT transmit sensitive data via e-Mail
 Do NOT open attachments nor follow links sent by e-Mail

James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3