Is it possible to use a shared network folder as file reposi

[cinnamonandcherries]

I am just curious if housing and working off a network drive is possible, and if so, what are the risks involved? Currently my team is working through a limited-scope pilot project in which we are authoring in Oxygen Author 15.1 and using a 3rd party subscription based repository. As the pilot progresses, we are struggling with the 3rd party solution and their level of support (i.e., files are getting corrupted, and they struggle with implementing our specializations). The end goal is to use an Alfresco/Componize stack, but that is still a few months away. We are looking for alternatives to the 3rd party subscription fees, and unpredictability, while we wait for our long-term solution.

Any suggestions are welcome!
Thanks!

[Radu]

Hi Samantha,

In my opinion having multiple writers edit documents from a common shared network location is dangerous because you may end up overwriting a file the content that someone else has been writing on. You also have no history of who made what modification and no redundancy of content, if somehow the network drive fails or files get corrupted you have no copy of your repository to start over.
It's unfortunate that we have quite a lot of users doing this though. What Oxygen does to help is that if you have an XML document opened in the editor and someone else changes it on the shared network drive, Oxygen will refresh the content of the opened XML document to reflect the changes on disk. If the XML document is modified on your side, Oxygen will warn you that somebody else changed its contents on disk but this will not do much because you end up with a conflict anyway and no way of seeing what changed on the remote location.

My advice is to start using a free and open source versioning system like Subversion (SVN), CVS or GIT.
For example Oxygen comes with an embedded SVN Client and for writing our user manual we collaborate using a subversion server installed on a Linux machine.
We made a small video demonstration showing how this colaboration is done:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/demo/Collabora ... rsion.html

The advantage to using versioning systems is immense, we know the history of each resource, we know who made what change, we can create tags and branches for marking certain versions of the documentation, each user has his own local copy of the repository and if the server fails we have the same content duplicated in many other places.

Other approaches:

Use a Webdav repository. When Oxygen opens an XML document from a Webdav repository, it locks the XML document and thus prevents other users from saving changes to it while still allowing them to open the document.

Use a commercial CMS which in addition to the first suggestion will bring more workflow related tools and ways to keep your content valid. And there are quite a few CMSs which have an integration with Oxygen:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/partners.html# ... s%28cms%29

Regards,
Radu

[cinnamonandcherries]

Thank you for the input. I will have to explore some of the options that you have provided.

~Samantha