I am looking for Version Control for office documents

Question

I would like to see if there are any offline options for version control.

The problem:

The basic set up is, that documents are stored on a central server, and everyone works on their own version of the document, with poor naming conventions, in addition, no communication between members within this office. This starts a few nightmare scenarios, where already open documents overwrite existing documents, edits and orders are mixed up and at the end of the day, it simply wastes company money.

Additional problems:

While I would love to learn how to use something like GitHub for this kinda thing, the people in this particular office are technologically challenged, and I feel my pitch for something complex might just frustrate them, leading them back to doing the same thing they were done before.

What I would like:

I would like something self-hosted, so I can put it on our internal network, and depending on my colleague's ability to adapt, allow it to be on the net at some point.

It needs to be somewhat simplistic, where at the end of the day someone can look at all the changes done to a certain file, and say accept X, Y or Z, allowing it to generates a new file with a specific naming convention.

I have looked at TortoiseGit/SVN and Gogs self-hosted. I don't know enough to say if this is the correct solution, or it's easy. All 3 look complex, but Gogs, seems to have a nice interface and well laid out.

I have seen a few of the threads on here, and poked at a few options people have mentioned, but, I am unsure.

Any help or explanation would be greatly appreciated.

My limitations

When it comes to something like TortoiseSVN, I can easily install that. When it comes to something like Gogs, I can probably install it with some decent instructions, but I won't pretend I know exactly what I am doing.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

SVN is actually worth a shot. TortoiseSVN has facilities to diff Office files (at least, doc(x) and xls(x)), it looks like this:

Though there are easy to install SVN servers with GUI like VisualSVN, an HTTP-based server is not even needed because TortoiseSVN can create and use repositories on the file system.

The only catch is the 3-way merge: I couldn't find any information about whether and how it's possible.

Git is even more convenient in the long run since it e.g. 1)allows to save incomplete work locally in stages and only upload it to the central server once it's complete and 2)allows to work offline. But it has a steeper learning curve.

Answer 2

I assume that you are using Microsoft Office documents (vs. LibreOffice, etc.). If you can waive your requirement for being self-hosted, then I think Microsoft's solution to this problem is to use a Sharepoint site. Given that you said you might migrate to the net in the future, I'm assuming your preference for self-hosted is due to technical/control concerns not legal requirements.

Sharepoint is part of the Office 365 suite and costs money. You didn't specify that you want a free solution (although most of your examples are free). However, if your employer already subscribes to Office 365, then Sharepoint is available to you at no additional cost.

Sharepoint supports simple, linear versioning of documents, and integrates with the desktop applications for saving documents directly to the site, etc.