I mentioned "track changes" - we're using it, and it is quite a handy
feature. But it has a cost in file size - a document that is only a few hundred
K without "track changes" rapidly becomes megabytes in size, making it more
painful to upload and download - please bear in mind that not all TC members are
sitting in the US on the backbone of the Net...
The compare tool in Word only works with "track changes" switched on, in my
experience. It is not available if you want to compare two arbitrary files, or
two files that are different branches of the same original document. That would
be a valuable tool (anyone care to write it?).
The other drawback to "track changes" comes when a document has been
through a number of revisions, and Word chokes on loading it, or worse, on
saving it. We have had to save the document without "track changes" on, and then
start tracking again, on many occasions - usually without major data loss
:-)
Life gets even more "entertaining" when various TC members are using
different versions of Word - Office2k, OfficeXP, Office2k3, even one
who is using a pre-release version of the next release... - "track changes"
becomes an exciting roller-coaster ride :-(
I'm not a beginner at this :-)
Tony Rogers
-----Original Message-----
From: David RR Webber
[mailto:]
Sent: Thu 19-Feb-04 8:16
To:
Rogers, Tony; Matthew MacKenzie; Christopher B Ferris
Cc:
; Chairs OASIS
Subject: Re: [chairs] need
your comments on DocMgmt system requirements
Tony,
MSWord has its own track changes mechanism that
works well. And of course
Comments and highlighting.
It also has a decent compare tool too - all
built-in.
We're using this for the CAM spec's development
right now.
I'm warming to the idea of a HTML based CVS
system too.
These newer versions are clearly a step up and if they are
open source - thats better yet.
Thanks, DW.
----- Original Message -----
From: Rogers, Tony
To: Matthew MacKenzie ; Christopher B
Ferris
Cc: ; Chairs OASIS
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 4:09
PM
Subject: RE: [chairs] need your
comments on DocMgmt system requirements
Make a couple of changes in a Word document and store it in CVS (yeah,
binary is probably how you'd do it) - it stores the entire file again,
rather than the changes - that's what I'm calling inefficient, meaning
"using more storage than is necessary to store the changes". I didn't say
"bad". I didn't say "unusable". I said "inefficient", and I cordially
disagree with your statement that "It is not.".
I have used CVS for over 10 years, and it's a useful place to store
source code. It's a lot less useful when storing non-text files,
however.
One of the features of CVS and ancilliary programs that I use
frequently is a display of the differences between two versions of a file. I
don't get that facility when CVS is storing Word documents - all I can do is
retrieve the two Word documents and look at them (anyone got a good Diff for
Word?). That's a big loss, especially in this environment, where we have
multiple authors. To make matters worse, it encourages use of the "track
changes" feature of Word, and that produces much larger Word
documents...
So what I am asking is: is there a system which will give us this
valuable feature for Word documents? (Ideally, also for PDF files) Something
that will allow us to see things like "this paragraph was added by
Mr Slowsteady on 13 July, and modified by Ms Quicksmart on 14 August".
If the answer to that is an expensive document management system, then let's
consider it. If it can work on top of CVS so we can use native CVS
facilities for text and html files, then that's a bonus.
Tony Rogers
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew
MacKenzie [mailto:]
Sent: Thu 19-Feb-04 7:34
To: Christopher B Ferris
Cc: Rogers, Tony;
; Chairs OASIS
Subject: Re: [chairs]
need your comments on DocMgmt system requirements
cvs -z9 add -kb mydoc.doc
You need to mark the document as "binary", and to not expand
keywords. The -z flag tells the client the level of compression to use.
I've been using CVS almost daily for 5 years, and there are several binary
files in there (jars, zips, docs, pdfs, ps, exe, gz, ...).
Is CVS inefficient in storing and versioning MS Word, or other binary
documents? No. It is not. Does CVS integrate with MS Word to make the cvs
diff command and conflict resolution work? No. If we want that, OASIS will
probably want to pony up big bucks for a high end content management
system.
On Feb 18, 2004, at 4:23 PM, Christopher B Ferris wrote:
Right, but you can store word docs in CVS... it's just inefficient.
As for
HTML/XML,
it works just fine.
Cheers,
Christopher Ferris
STSM, Emerging e-business Industry Architecture
email:
blog: http://webpages.charter.net/chrisfer/blog.html
phone: +1 508 377 9295
"Rogers, Tony" <> wrote on 02/18/2004
03:13:55 PM:
In my experience, CVS doesn't handle MS Word documents well. It
is
designed for plain-text source
code, and MS Word's file format doesn't allow it to produce an
economical diff between one version
and the next. This means that it wastes considerable space when
versioning Word. I cannot comment
on its ability to version html, but I suspect it would do much
better on
that. Perhaps we should
all be using TeX, because that can be versioned more readily (ah,
that
was a joke...)
Is there a tool that would be able to version MS Word more
effectively?
I certainly don't know.
Does that mean we shouldn't use Word? I hope not - our TC has
found
Word's change tracking rather
useful when working collaboratively.
Tony Rogers
co-chair UDDI TC
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl F. Best [mailto:]
Sent: Thu 19-Feb-04 2:04
To: Norman Walsh
Cc: Chairs OASIS; Jeff Lomas
Subject: Re: [chairs] need your comments on DocMgmt system
requirements
Norman Walsh wrote:
/ "Karl F. Best" <> was heard to
say:
| I've put together a draft functional requirements document
for this
| doc mgmt system and would like to get your feedback. It is
very
| important that we have the requirements correct and complete
before
we
| start development of the project -- many of you are
developers so
I'm
| sure that you understand the importance of this.
High level comments:
- I don't think these requirements adequately address the
distinction
between a development system (where TCs actively revise
documents,
schemas, etc.) and a publication system (where TCs post working
drafts, standards, and other "finished" work products).
Is the proposal to develop one or the other, or both. If it's
one
or
the other, then I think some of these requirements are
completely
inappropriate. If it's both, I think it might be useful to
specify
them separately. (And whether you imagine having resources to
do
them in sequence, or at the same time?)
I've previously thought of having a two-phase system, the first
of which
would provide a "sandbox" for the TC members to collaborate in
developing a document. Then once the doc reached a certain stage
it
would then go into a more controlled environment with e.g.
versioning
and edited only by the TC. I've gotten the impression that most
TCs
would only use the second phase, but I could be wrong.
Chairs: would you prefer having both of these phases built into
the doc
mgmt system (open collaboration, followed by more rigourous
control)? or
would you only use the second?
- There are several places where the requirements seem to be
self-contradictory.
Specifics? This is obviously a draft so needs polishing, so
suggestions
are welcome.
- I think meeting all of the requirements listed below will be
a
significant challenge. A more detailed roadmap, showing staged
progress with realistic time estimates would be very helpful.
Yeah. That's the next step. But right now I'm just gathering
requirements. I can't very well write a development schedule
until I
know what it is that we're trying to build.
I'd also like suggestions on which parts of this are most
important. I'm
debating whether we should try a phased development approach
(i.e.
provide base functionality now then add a more functionality over
time).
Looking through the requirements that I have now, though, I'm not
sure
which ones we could put off until later.
Chairs: suggestions please.
- A number of the features that you describe would seem to be
at least
partially addressed by open source efforts like G-Forge (an
open
source version of SourceForge). Are you considering a system
like
that, or are you expecting to "roll your own" from scratch.
I'm intending for us to build on top of an existing system.
That's why I
said "probably CVS". We'd be silly to build something from
scratch when
the engine already exists. We'll build some sort of customized
web
interface on top of the engine. Once we have the requirements
we'll know
what it is that we need to build. I'd also like suggestions for
the
engine; is CVS the way to go, or do people recommend something
else?
OASIS DocMgmt Functional Requirements
(17 February 2004)
General Description: A repository providing
storage/management of
files created by TCs, SCs, and other OASIS groups
Technical committees need to be able to store and manage a
collection
of resources. Principal among these resources are documents,
but it's
reasonable to consider other, related resources as well,
including
issue lists, archives, news items, and syndicated content.
The doc mgmt system would store any type of file. Not just specs,
but
also the other doc types you mention.
Would some of these stored objects be links and not files?
o Probably based on CVS
The requirements for a "development tree" are likely to be
somewhat
different than the requirements for a "publishing tree". In
particular, I would expect published standards to be
more-or-less
immutable, to have persistent URIs, etc. In a development tree,
those
constraints might be quite stifling.
CVS supports a development system very well. It's not
immediately
clear to me if it supports a publication system equally well.
I'm certainly not a CVS expert, though I'm aware that it was
built for
development rather than documents. So it may not be ideal for
what we
want.
Does anyone have suggestions for a better engine, better suited
for doc
development and publishing, upon which to build our system?
o A separate area in the repository for each TC/SC/group;
both
default and definable hierarchy within each TC area
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "both default and
definable"?
What do you have in mind for "default"?
When we create a new TC we would define hierarchy branches for
such
things as e.g. "drafts", "minutes", "contributions" etc. (TBD).
Then the
TC chair could define additional branches as required. We'd want
to keep
the hierarchy as flat as possible to keep the URLs short, and
we'd want
some consistency, but I want to give the TCs some control over
there
space.
o All documents are permanently archived (only Admin has
delete
rights)
In CVS terms, you can delete a document, but you can always
recover
it. In a development tree, it's not uncommon to reorganize some
code
or a document and want to remove modules from the current
"head" of
the development tree. This goes back to my comment before that
the
requirements for publication and development are somewhat
different.
Maybe this is where the "sandbox" (above) comes in. I don't see
the need
of permanently archiving early drafts, but once a doc is checked
into
the permanent repository it should be permanent.
o All documents are publicly viewable, downloadable
o Repository has a web interface for uploading and tree
browsing,
searching, and retrieval
+ Support for all major browsers
+ Listing of single files includes filename, title,
description,
date, creator, and language; listing of packages includes the
list of single files in the package
+ Search by filename, title, date, creator, and language; and
full-text search of description and contents.
Does it have other interfaces? Are you describing a front-end
for CVS
here, or something else? Does it support Web-DAV?
I would expect that most people would want to use a web
interface, but I
suppose that power users may want to deal more directly with the
engine.
But there's also certain safeguards (permissions, restrictions on
naming, etc.) that may require that we use an interface. I don't
know
yet; this may depend on the engine.
What are the benefits of Web-DAV? (I'm not an expert on this.)
I think it would make sense to address searching as its own
top-level
item. In particular, the description above suggests that every
item
will have a set of metadata that can be searched. Where/when is
this
metadata created? Can I add my own? Is it expressed in an open
format,
an XML vocabulary or RDF or a topic map, or is it proprietary?
How
does this metadata evolve as documents change in CVS?
I see the metadata as comprised of the fields listed above. TBD.
I don't
know yet how this would be expressed because we havne't selected
an
engine yet.
How does this matter? Yes, we should use XML on principle, but I
don't
see it as a requirement.
As for searching the content, that's clearly going to depend on
the
type of content. What types will the system support?
Obviously not all content will be searchable. If somebody uploads
a blob
there's not much we'll be able to do with it besides just store
it.
We will store whatever types of files the TCs need to store.
Persistent URLs
o At file creation the document is assigned a URL according
to the
OASIS file naming scheme. The URL will always resolve to the
latest
version of the document, regardless of the documents
(versioned)
filename; a URL will identify a specification throughout its
entire
lifetime from working draft to OASIS Standard. Previous
versions of
the document will be accessible via a variant of the URL
containing
the version number.
This is fine for storing standards but it's in conflict with
the use
of CVS and the reference above to a "definable hierarchy".
Again, I'm not an expert on what you can and can't do with CVS.
Suggestions welcome.
I think this should apply to published standards and work
products,
but I don't think it can practically be applied to a
development
space.
If we have a "sandbox" phase then we wouldn't expect a persistent
URL
for those items. Only once a doc is checked into the permanent
repository would we do this.
This suggests that the interface to the published standards
space
might require more constraints. I hope that these constraints
can be
imposed without requiring me to interact with the system only
through
a web interface.
As above, power users like yourself may wish to talk directly to
the
engine, but there will be some constraints for security and
consistency.
If it is practical to enforce those constraints via both a web
interface
as well as a native interface then we will. But if it's not
practical
then we'll have to do everything through a browser.
Multiple file types supported
o TCs will store both source (e.g. MSWord or HTML) and
compiled (e.g.
PDF) versions of each file; i.e. the repository should not
allow a
PDF to be checked in without a matching .doc or .html file
Uhm, what about documents that have a source which is neither a
proprietary tool or HTML?
The above is not an exhaustive list. I'm just suggesting that
both
source and compiled versions should be in the repository. Any
responsible developer should agree with this philosophy.
Imposing the requirement that the system check for classes of
dependencies between files of different types is going to be
tricky,
especially as the specs evolve. Suppose I rebuild the PDF, can
I check
it in without checking in a new source document? What if I only
corrected a formatting bug? If I check in a new source, what
happens
to the PDF?
Yeah, we'll have to figure this out. How do you do it when you
write
code?
I think a lot more detail is required in this part of the
requirements.
That's why I'm asking for input.
o HTML files may include graphics which will be stored with
the file
(use relative URLs?)
What about other cross-document links? What about XML files
that refer
to both HTML and PDF presentations? What about document trees
that
consist of multiple chapters in a hierarchy with a common set
of
figures?
More detail, please.
More input, please.
o use MIME types
Packages
o A specification may be composed of multiple documents. The
entire
package may be uploaded or downloaded in a single operation.
Individual documents in the package may also be uploaded or
downloaded.
I don't understand what you mean here. Are you suggesting that
I might
upload a package (as a ZIP file? as a MIME multi-part related
stream?)
and then several days later upload a new version of one
component in
that package. Having done so, what "version" does the package
have?
Can I still download the original? Can I download the revised
version?
Probably the package will just be an HTML file with links to all
of the
components. In that case the package is updated by editing the
links in
the package file. Each of the components are maintained by
editing them
individually. Each component, as well as the package file, could
have
its own version number or date, but the entire set would
collectively
have to be versioned. Would this work?
o Support for chapters or parts of a multi-part document
(with links
between parts); a package could have a ToC with links to the
individual files
I think any attempt to describe the size and shape of a package
("it
will have
a ToC and chapters" or "it will have a starting page and
parts") will
be
problematic. Best just to accept that a multi-part document is
a
directed
graph (a web).
Would my description (above) of a package work for this? The TC
can
decide how it wants to structure the multi-part spec.
o Support for modular DTDs (e.g. DocBook)
What does this requirement mean? Do you also mean modular W3C
XML
Schemas and RELAX NG grammars? Does this requirement differ
from the
preceding one in a particular way?
Pretty much the same, I think, but I'd be happy to hear other
requirements not met by the above.
o The entire package is addressable via a single URL, as are
the
individual documents. The package URL will link to an HTML
page
listing the package contents.
Is that an HTML page constructed by the author of the package,
or
automatically from the content of the package? If it's the
latter,
what constraints, if any, does that impose on the contents of
the
package?
Security
o Check-in/out based on Kavi user authentication; different
permissions for public, TC members, chair/secretary, etc.
o TC members have ??? rights (TBD)
o TC Chair and Secretary have create, edit rights for folders
and
checkin/out rights for documents in their respective TC area
o Admin has admin rights (create, checkin/out, delete of all
folders
and files)
o Public has read rights for all documents
How does "admin" differ from chair/secretary?
"Admin" is the OASIS staff administrator of the dc mgmt system.
Kavi integration
o Kavi user acct/pswd used for authentication in doc mgmt
system
o Notification to the Kavi group when a document is uploaded
(same as
current Kavi notification)
o The current Kavi doc repository is disabled; links within
Kavi will
go to this doc mgmt system instead (i.e. Kavi doc repository
is
hidden, this one drops in to replace it).
o Docs currently in the Kavi repository will continue to be
addressable and viewable by their Kavi URL (allow for
migration
over
time)
This requirement and the previous requirement seem to be in
conflict.
Can you explain how "the links within Kavi will go to this doc
mgmt
system instead" supports the goal that "the Kavi repository
will
continue to be addressable and viewable by their Kavi URL
(allow for
migration over time)"?
Right now when you're in Kavi you can click on a link for "doc
repository" and it will take you to that page in Kavi. I'd like
it to go
to the new doc mgmt system instead. But we should allow current
docs in
the Kavi repository to stay where they're at until the TC wants
to move
them, so these docs need to remain addressable by the current
URLs.
We'll have to keep the Kavi search/browse accessible, but the
default
would go to the new doc mgmt system.
o When new Kavi group (TC/SC) is created, a doc mgmt area for
that
group and default folders are automatically created
This goes back to the question of defaults before. What
hierarchy do
you have in mind, and what are your motivations for creating
it? I
think it'll be easier in the long run to simply create an empty
hierarchy and let the TCs populate it.
If you have in mind that minutes should go in /minutes and
press
clippings should go in /press, etc., then I think a detailed
description of the default hierarchy is required.
See above. Still TBD, but we need both consistency as well as
flexibility.
File naming (automation of this done in a later phase; just
do this
manually at first?)
o Naming and versioning of documents follows OASIS file
naming scheme
o When a new document is created it will be named according
to the
scheme; automated helps to create/assign a name
This seems to duplicate the requirements expressed under
"Persistent
URLs". Is it intended to be different? I believe my comments
there
apply here as well.
Th eintent is to provide (eventually, maybe a bit later) a GUI to
help
name new files conformant with the OASIS doc naming scheme. I
envision
pull-downs to select each of the components of the name. But this
will
probably be later; the file creator would have to manually name
the file
for now.
Localizable interface, with localization to occur in a later
phase
Later phase: Count/traffic report of downloads (how many
people have
downloaded a particular doc?)
Other later phase items?
- Issue tracking?
Sounds like a separate tool. Yes, we need this. Suggestions?
- automatic generation of PDF/HTML from source formats?
Yeah, we could add this, but is there a need? Can't people do
this
already?
- validation?
Ditto. Can't you do this already?
But, yes, I see the utility of having validation on checkin, and
publishing, as part of a doc mgmt system.
- interactive forms (e.g., the ability to support an interface
that
asks a number of questions and then builds an appropriate
schema
customization layer)?
That's the sort of interface I had in mind for the file naming
(above).
But I see this as a separate tool for later.
- Syndication of announcements
- An informal "journal" space (or blog, if you will) for TC
members
to outline their thoughts and ideas?
Both of those are separate tools. Not sure how those would be
part of a
doc mgmt system.
Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
-Karl
Be seeing you,
norm
P.S. I'm happy to report that your requirements document can be
nicely
presented in an open format (plain text, in this case) instead
of a
proprietary format. I hope that its greater accessibility in
this
format (and the fact that it's six times smaller) can be used
to
demonstrate once again the value of open standards.
(For even more thoughts on this topic, see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)
--
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
Vice President, OASIS
office +1 978.667.5115 x206 mobile +1 978.761.1648
http://www.oasis-open.org
___________________________
Matthew MacKenzie
Senior Architect
Intelligent Documents Business Unit
Adobe Systems Canada Inc.
http://www.adobe.com/
506 869.0949
