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I was pushed, kicking and screaming, into using SourceSafe in a contract a
couple of years ago. I liked it and had no problems with it. Its primary
advantage for a lone writer comes if you need to access the code or the
other documents (specs, project plans, etc.) that other non-writer members
on the team produce. I had to document some code in my project, and since
that code was always changing, having easy access to the most recent version
was very valuable. In addition, just in browsing through the directories I
found all kinds of source documents, things the programmers had written up
and never told me about, that proved useful during research stages of the
documentation projects. (I even found a neat code editor that put different
elements of the code in different colors: making the process of listing and
describing all functions, say, infinitely easier, as I didn't have to search
for them using multiple key phrases.) SS also provides a further level of
software security for your docs, which may be one of the reasons why they
want you to use it. In addition, the physical machine that SS resides on
may also be more secure than your current server. For a project manager who
has to maintain difficult-to-calculate statistics about what percent of each
project task any one person on the team has finished, putting the writer's
output into SourceSafe might offer him or her additional data to get
completion stats on. Plus it gives a project manager a visual scheme of the
entire project: it's directory structure shows everybody's work areas,
including yours: a quick way for a manager with lots of projects going on to
see which person is assigned to which projects. Other than that, if you ever
do get another writer on board, even an in-house contractor for a short
term, SS's library check-out system, of course, makes the transfer of
documents easier and reduces the errors due to duplicate documents being
worked on by two or more writers.
