Re: Document management

["William Grega, Jr." <WGrega -at- WORLDNET -dot- ATT -dot- NET>]

Document Management Using Visual SourceSafe and Your Intranet:

I'll make this terse. That way, you can probe for further details in
specific areas you have questions about.

1. On your corporate intranet website, create a page called Document Center.
Create a navigation bar (navbar) that lists all your participating
departments (for instance, QA, Product Development...). Don't worry about
what these will point to yet.

2. The Visual SourceSafe disk allows you to set up as Client or Server. Set
yourself up as server on the machine you want to host SourceSafe and to
contain all corporate documents. You obviously want to make sure this
machine is secure and backed up nightly.

3. When setting up the Server option, you make yourself Administrator. An
Administrator can set up users and set permissions. Set yourself up as a
user with Read, Write, Add and Delete access. (I won't go into details here.
It's a simple process documented in online help).

4. Go back to your machine with the install disk and set yourself up as
SourceSafe Client. (This is a process you will repeat for everyone you want
to add to the database).

5. Make sure to set yourself up to the database your created (point to the
srcsafe.ini file on the server). This will be the default. When prompted,
create a Working Directory on your machine. The working directory is where
files from the server will be checked out to on your local machine when you
are working on them. SourceSafe only allows 1 person at a time to check out
files for editing. At all times you can see who has a file checked out, when
they checked it out, and where they checked it out to. Anyone with the
proper permissions can *view* a file in read-only status. SourceSafe keeps
an audit trail of all changes made to files, who made them and when. You can
revert to previous versions of files if you need to.

6. Create the directory structure of your database. For added security and
intranet considerations, we created two master folders: Restricted and
Shared. Under each of these folders, we created folders for each of the
departments (QA, Product Development...). The difference is this: you will
"Shadow" the Shared directory to another directory (call it DocControl) on
the server. Then, the
Intranet navbar departments listed in Step 1 will reference each of these
departments. I am making a common assumption here: that you are an NT shop,
and that end-users have common software packages on their machine. In our
case, that is Microsoft Office.

7. Add users, give them appropriate permissions. In our shop, the QA
personnel have all permissions to the QA folders under Restricted and
Shared. And that's it! They can't even View files from other departments.
And vice-versa.  If another department wants to make a document public, they
Check It In to the Shared directory and it is immediately and automatically
published to the corporate intranet. (If it's a Word or Excel document, it
comes up as such when double-clicked in  the directory list).

 I hope this clarify questions that have been posted to this thread,

Will Grega
Technical Writer
Information Designer


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