Since 2005 Crossroads has used subversion to manage our church documents. Because the software I first used was called TortoiseSVN, it got called 'NInja Turtle' and the document repository itself got called 'the Sewer'.
Our current resources page just publishes pdfs saved in one folder of our repository.
It has been a very helpful tool to have. It's nice being able to travel back in time and retrieve old documents that have been changed or deleted a long time ago. It's nice to ensure that we all have the same version of various guidelines, goals, calendars and other documents. It's nice to have access to church documents even if I'm away from my personal computer. It's nice to be able to direct people to a central place to get documents, rather than have to send attachments all the time.
There are problems of course:
- We currently don't have an web-based way to edit documents on the repository. This means that for someone to add or change things they have to download software, export the repository... all of this are big psychological barriers for people.
- Filing and naming conventions are always difficult. There is no one way to save everything that seems obvious to everyone.
- It has been a major culture change to get people to update the central respository, rather than just documents on their personal computer.
What methods does your church use for document management?
