[australia] Concurrent development/revisions of a single topic

[hedley.finger@myob.com]

Our training materials consist of a bank of topics which are combined in 
various ways for different courses, then issued as printed coursebooks.

An obstacle we have encountered is ownership collisions.  That is, two or 
more writers want to (a) work on the same file at once or (b) need shared 
files to build a coursebook, for review or release.

The CVS and Subversion (SVN) source-code versioning applications used 
widely in open-source development DO allow two or more programmers to 
modify a single file and, if revisions have been made to different lines, 
merges the changes as each programmer checks in their copy.  On those 
occasions where changes have been made to the same lines by different 
people, the last person to check in is warned of a conflict and is able to 
view the two variants and merge them manually.

Does anybody know of a CMS that is

@       is XML aware
@       is able to diff and merge different versions of an XML file based 
on elements (rather than lines of code as source-code version repositories 
do)
@       is able to track versions through the workflow to release
@       is able to branch from the trunk and merge back to the trunk (or 
to other selected branches)
@       supports concurrent development WITHOUT requiring private branches 
for each writer to solve the ownership collision problem

When a similar question was posed on dita-users and framemaker-dita at 
Yahoo! Groups, CMS vendors were quick to extol the virtues of their CMSs 
in this regard but fell silent when I made it clear that I was NOT talking 
about branches to allow concurrent development.  We want to keep our 
branching policy simple, to allow for alternative versions and to manage 
releases, eventually merging these (temporary) branches back into the 
trunk.  We do NOT want to allow branching to allow concurrent development 
because this merely shifts the burden of managing ownership collisions to 
one of managing many branches and merging them back into the trunk.

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Finger
Training Content Developer and Tools Specialist
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd <http://myob.com/au>
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia
<mailto:hedleyDOTfingerATmyobDOTcom>
Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

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