Choosing a version control package for document control

We have a legal requirement to ensure the latest version of documents (mainly Word and Excel) are readily accessible. We currently implement document control by manually updating the page footer with a new version number but want a better system.

I've played around with TortoiseSVN and the functionality is good; but the problem is that unless I've missed a configuration variable somewhere, Subversion applies version numbers to the whole project (i.e. every file in the repository), not to the individual files. What I want is to be able to create a folder in the repository and all our documents go in there, and the version numbers of the files are only changed when that particular document is changed. Currently if we had 30 files and each was printed and put on display including the version numbers, if someone went to the repository the version number would almost certainly have changed even if the document contents were identical. Not ideal.

The alternative to this would be to create a new repository for each and every document but the administrative overhead on that will be prohibitive. I'm essentially looking for something that does much of what TortoiseSVN does, but treats files as individual projects with their own independent version number.

Whatever solution we come up with we would want the version of the docu开发者_JS百科ment to be automatically shown in the page footer of the document. Tortoise can do this with a macro http://insights.oetiker.ch/windows/SvnProperties4MSOffice/.

Appreciate any help, thanks. Greg

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I think what you're actually looking for is a document management system.

Version Control Systems (VCS), such as Subversion (the underlying technology behind TortoiseSVN), are fundamentally unsuited for your task due to their focus on tracking changesets among all files within a given project (i.e. one changeset/version can involve changes to many files within the project).

Another advantage of using a document management system is that they typically allow you to attach extensible metadata attributes to your documents in a much richer way than version control systems, as well as providing search capabilities.