• (cs)

    Haha, that's what you get when you stray from mature technologies like CVS.

  • Fred (unregistered) in reply to Wolfraider
    Wolfraider:
    too many people just want to install it and walk away and lets users do what they want. They then blame the product when the real issue is you need to configure it correctly and maintain it.
    Umm, isn't that exactly what MS has been selling (but not delivering) for about 25 years now?

    What I really love is the way MS tells end users "buy this, it will be easy" and then when they buy it and it needs actual brains after all, they come to their local tech support and hold us responsible for MS' failure to deliver on its promise. That's a pretty good trick! How do I get such a deal? I sell stuff, collect the money, and when it doesn't work as advertised somebody else is on the hook!

  • (cs)

    One word..... WORM.

    Everything solved.

  • (cs) in reply to rudraigh
    rudraigh:
    Wait ... what? Ok, which is "glitchy"? Office or the SVN?
    HR.
  • rnelson0 (unregistered)
    They also insisted that the only solution to the problem was a very large and very expensive Human Resources Management Portal sold by a vendor who just happened to send very large and very expensive cookie baskets.
    How is that people do not realize the gift baskets dry up once you sign the contract? You have to string them out to get the most out of this!
  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    GalacticCowboy:
    TRWTF is going on and on about how broken Office and SVN are, then showing a screenshot of nothing but PDF documents.

    Office 2010 can create PDF file from Word and Excel

    ... but in Word 2010 you can't amend your default document template except by finding where it lives in App Data/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates and explicitly opening it, amending it in Word, and closing it carefully again. Oh, and section contents management and change tracking are hair-raisingly buggy. Don't argue, they are. You may scream PEBKAC at me all you want, I have my fingers in my ears, I'm not listening, la La la la ...

  • kosh (unregistered) in reply to herpometer
    herpometer:
    TRWTF is expecting HR types to be able to use SVN correctly.
    +1
  • sewerrat (unregistered) in reply to evilspoons

    I actually won an award at my company for getting us to switch over to SVN. I don't know what is worse, the fact that I got an award for something so dumb, or the fact that I deserve it because it took so much work to convince people that version control wouldn't somehow eat their code (I guess they had a bad experience with VSS once).

  • (cs)
    They even a “Previous Versions” directory, which of course, held even more versions of the documents.

    I think you accidentally something.

  • (cs) in reply to kastein
    kastein:
    anon:
    So TRWTF is using SVN, a program that only a moron would expect an HR department to use properly, instead of VSS, which was designed for this exact situation and requires little to no training.
    Yeah, you just need someone to babysit your VSS server and frantically fix the database (though it's more of a tangled mess of randomly named flat files on a network share than an actual database) every few days/weeks when it falls over and chokes on something.

    VSS is unsafe at any speed.

    C-Octothorpe:
    El Tachyon:
    I would love to see what happens if they had used Git instead. That would probably allow a true monster of a repository.

    Referring to my previous post about VSS, let them dump hundreds of thousands of man-hours into their work only to randomly get a corrupted repo store.

    Anytime I talk to somebody about VSS, their eyes glaze over as if they're talking about their war stories from 'nam...

    eyes glazing over

    It was an uphill battle to get SVN used here instead of VSS and it was worth every muffled curse and headdesk.

    Suck-wise, how is TFS compared to VSS? Many of the developers here say it's vastly improved. And from what I've seen, if you were forced to use Clear Case for more than a week, you'd be begging for an alpha-version of the very first edition of VSS. Or 3x5 cards.

  • JV (unregistered)

    There are alternatives to SharePoint, such as Alfresco and KnowledgeTree, which also integrate with Office.

    Project Server on the other hand... sigh

  • Gatesy (unregistered)

    I think the version they had must be the same version that is used to write these articles. It seems words often go missing:

    Article:
    They even a “Previous Versions” directory,
  • Gatesy (unregistered) in reply to blastomite
    blastomite:
    My first thought upon reading the conclusion is "WELCOME TO SHAREPOINT!!"

    The solution that is easily sold to an organization as the silver bullet to fix all your problems.

    And the largest repository of ProjectBRDv1.docx, ProjectBRDv2.doxc, ..., ProjectBRDvN files in an organization.

    They make good cookie baskets!

  • JV (unregistered) in reply to SQLDave
    SQLDave:
    Suck-wise, how is TFS compared to VSS? Many of the developers here say it's vastly improved. And from what I've seen, if you were forced to use Clear Case for more than a week, you'd be begging for an alpha-version of the very first edition of VSS. Or 3x5 cards.

    TFS sucks ass, particularly from an installation, configuration and maintenance standpoint.

    As a dev who has used VSS, TFS, Clear Case, CVS, SVN, git, and now Mercurial... Mercurial is just hands-down bad ass, especially combined with the latest version of TortoiseHg.

  • Nickleback (unregistered) in reply to Father Time
    Father Time:
    Pee-nut:
    TRWTF is waiting until noon to post a story.

    It's always noon somewhere...

    nOT AT TEN PAST THREe

    i THink my VERSION of MOZilla is broken...

  • Moto (unregistered) in reply to boog
    boog:
    Kuba:
    empire:
    TRWTF is that no one looked at their SVN repo that was likely hundreds of GB and said, hmmm, why is this so big?
    Were it to be used properly, the size would have likely been exactly the same. In SVN, file copies/moves take just a metadata entry. The fact that "new" versions are saved under different names is immaterial. They still are saved in the repository, in one copy, no matter what the name is.
    What reason do you have to believe HR was using SVN properly? I've worked with programmers who I couldn't convince to use the SVN copy/move/rename feature; every time they went to commit, they'd mindlessly add all "non-versioned" files (including build files and local "backup" copies, since they couldn't be convinced to use SVN revert either) and click "Commit" with no log message.

    Can't you require comments? I remember (with a different product, admittedly) trying to commit changes and getting a (I assume internally created by someone with a little bit of a sense of humour) message: "Please enter a comment with at least two words. Maybe a noun and a verb".

    Pity "off" is an adverb....

  • artyywe (unregistered) in reply to rudraigh
    rudraigh:
    Wait ... what? Ok, which is "glitchy"? Office or the SVN? A lot of words are used in convincing us that Office is glitchy (999 times out of 1000 it's user error) but the story is titled "The Glitchy SVN". At no point in the story is it explained how SVN is glitchy, only that the users are clueless and in bad need of training.

    Once again, TRWTF is the story itself.

    999 out of 1000 it's user error, is it? Wow. I'm not even sure how such statistics would be collected.

  • JV (unregistered) in reply to Moto
    Moto:
    Can't you require comments? I remember (with a different product, admittedly) trying to commit changes and getting a (I assume internally created by someone with a little bit of a sense of humour) message: "Please enter a comment with at least two words. Maybe a noun and a verb".

    Pity "off" is an adverb....

    Yeah, you can using SVN hooks. I wrote one that not only required comments and did a shitload of filtering to keep morons from committing unversioned files before ignore rules were configured (*.suo, .csproj.user, **/obj/, etc).

  • Jagruti (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Nagesh:
    GalacticCowboy:
    TRWTF is going on and on about how broken Office and SVN are, then showing a screenshot of nothing but PDF documents.

    Office 2010 can create PDF file from Word and Excel

    ... but in Word 2010 you can't amend your default document template except by finding where it lives in App Data/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates and explicitly opening it, amending it in Word, and closing it carefully again. Oh, and section contents management and change tracking are hair-raisingly buggy. Don't argue, they are. You may scream PEBKAC at me all you want, I have my fingers in my ears, I'm not listening, la La la la ...

    But I thinks you respond your doubts to wrong user. I didn't understanding in contexts.

  • (cs)

    Sigh. Unclear on the concept.

  • Shea (unregistered)

    Without a doubt, the countless hours of training, server space and processing time, frustration and spidering of a technical tool into non-technical professions is a whole lot easier than replacing a few copies of Office with a newer version or a different product.

    If you accept a bad premise, you deserve the IT nightmare you will inevitably create. If there are blocks of text missing and other bugs, any IT crew worth their salt can move to find the issue, be it server, buggy software or even user error (keyloggers if necessary) - the issue can be found.

    “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

    -Einstein

    Captcha: esse "It would have been esse to reinstall office and apply the patches as a starting point."

  • R. (unregistered) in reply to Kuba

    My thoughts exactly. They basically just independently invented the 'tags' directory. Granted, it's more than probable that they did so out of ignorance, but anyone who has (intelligently) used SVN knows that you avoid going back in revision history if you can help it. Copies in HEAD are more convenient, as long as you can anticipate which versions you want a snapshot of.

    TRWTF is that the HR users might have even had a similar thought: that SVN allows the IT guys to do spooky server magic to pull an overwritten version out of the ether in an emergency, but if you know in advance that you'll want to refer to a "previous version", you copy iit. Sounds an awful lot like normal SVN tagging to me.

    Too charitable? Maybe. Even if not, I'd bet good money that they didn't know the copies were cheap in disk space.

    Captcha: sagaciter. I refer you to page 253 of the "Twilight" saga...

  • R. (unregistered) in reply to R.

    Urgh, sorry, my previous comment was supposed to quote Kuba's post: "Were it to be used properly..." The preview made it look like it was included and I can't click and drag on this smartphone.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    Uh..hate to break it to ya'll, but people do this in Sharepoint too, regardless of training. I call it IVCS, idiot's version control system.

    Capcha: esse. Yo, esse, Ima git all merlyn on yer ass up in the cvs.

  • Gunslinger (unregistered)

    Looks the TRWTF is an HR department.

  • Herby (unregistered)

    What, you didn't try SCCS. Send them back to the stone age (1980 or so).

  • ReallyGood (unregistered)

    So the real WTF here is that this companies' IT department is incapable of managing situations with other departments. Instead of troubleshooting and fixing the problems they have introduced a pointless, convoluted workaround and then had a big yuck on the internet when people in HR can't use it in the manner they envisaged. I suppose that's bonus points for having two partially functioning systems.

  • Gary (unregistered)

    You are telling me that HR types put properly sort-ordered dates into filenames e.g. 20101122? Yeah, right.

    And check out the SVN dates for the filenames Orgchart20100816.pdf is dated 2010-08-31, etc...

  • The Great Lobachevsky (unregistered) in reply to SQLDave

    [quote user="SQLDave] Suck-wise, how is TFS compared to VSS? Many of the developers here say it's vastly improved. And from what I've seen, if you were forced to use Clear Case for more than a week, you'd be begging for an alpha-version of the very first edition of VSS. Or 3x5 cards.[/quote]

    I've been forced to use ClearCase for 6 years. Pity me.

  • (cs) in reply to Moto
    Moto:
    boog:
    ...and click "Commit" with no log message.
    Can't you require comments?
    Yes, you absolutely can, provided you meet the prerequisite of having competent admins that are capable of configuring the repository this way.
  • C.K. (unregistered) in reply to CaptainSmartass
    CaptainSmartass:
    ... Second, why was the IT department not monitoring the repo as it grew and nuking extraneous files (and wrist slapping whoever made them) as soon as they showed up for the first three months?

    Do you really think it would be a good idea to do anything potentially destructive to files owned by another department? They're not going to complain about a mess of extraneous files littering their repository because they are the ones causing the mess and they're acclimating themselves to it as it grows. However, the moment you delete some important document that they named "safe to remove v3 nov 2002.docx" (which outlines the corporate policy on removing internal memos from the premises on the date that an ex-employee, now seeking unemployment benefits, was written up for violating said policy) you will catch no end of flack and may find a sudden need to update your resume.

    Best to leave them to their own devices until they call you for help. You still risk making an existing problem worse; but that's better than making a new problem from scratch.

  • passing_by (unregistered)

    why save as PDF if they need to frequently update the list?

  • (cs)

    This just in: if you set up people with something like SVN and then don't train them, they'll do it wrong. At my workplace, the WSS is being severely abused because a lot of people were never told about things like versioning.

  • I like toast (unregistered)

    I used VSS for years and it never broke. But anyway you could also recommend Perforce which has a similar visual interface around a much better core.

    Odd they went to all that trouble rather than try using Office on a new PC, or monitor the Broken Edition to see what went wrong.

  • Donald (unregistered)

    It's just a glitch in the matrix ... said ASmith.

    Agent Smith.

    Oh, forget it...

    abigo = agent, be gone...

  • (cs) in reply to rudraigh
    rudraigh:
    Wait ... what? Ok, which is "glitchy"? Office or the SVN? A lot of words are used in convincing us that Office is glitchy (999 times out of 1000 it's user error) but the story is titled "The Glitchy SVN". At no point in the story is it explained how SVN is glitchy, only that the users are clueless and in bad need of training.

    Once again, TRWTF is the story itself.

    No, TRWTF is readers such as yourself who can't understand the story.

    HR were convinced that Office had to be glitchy, because of course the problems they had couldn't be their fault. To shut them up, IT set them up with SVN so they could restore old versions of documents whenever they had problems (i.e. screwed things up again). This worked, to the extent that it made HR happy and got them off IT's back. In fact it made HR so happy that Accounting decided they wanted some of whatever it was that HR was smoking. When IT went to copy HR's setup for Accounting, they found that HR had done weird things with it (not really surprising: users who screw up using Office will also screw up using SVN).

    But it obviously couldn't have been the users' fault, just like the earlier problems with Office couldn't have been their fault. So clearly it must be SVN that's glitchy...

    (If you're still confused, the parts of the story that blame the software are sarcasm. The HR users refused to accept that the problems they had were due to user error; the only cause they would accept was software error. So from their point of view, every issue had to be an indication of glitchy software. In both cases, though, it was just the users not knowing what they were doing. Is that clear enough now?)

    Gatesy:
    I think the version they had must be the same version that is used to write these articles. It seems words often go missing:
    Nah, that's just the glitchy editor.
  • Not of this Earth (unregistered)

    Oh God save us from goblins in IT department.

    Captcha: enim - glitchy enum

  • edhardy (unregistered)

    The ed hardy clothing means the representative of tattoo vogue, [url=http://www.edhardyukshop.uk.com/]

  • (cs)

    It's obviously quite an advanced system: A file structure that lends itself to change history, stored as meta-history inside SVN.

    Now that is Real Redundancy Redundancy!

  • Mike (unregistered)

    Pretty much every organisation suffers from this and it's all because people insist on using file systems to store documents and filenames to store version metadata. Putting in a version control system won't fix this until you smash that notion out of the users skulls.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Wolfraider
    Wolfraider:
    Your Name:
    I swear, if they don't get concurrent editing in there soon, Google will eat their lunch. Google Docs is inferior to MSWord in every way except for concurrent editing of a document by multiple people on different computers, and that one feature makes me want to use it over Word if only my company gave the option to do so.

    Sharepoint 2010 and Office 2010 both work together to support versioning and concurrent editing. Sharepoint is really nice if you get it setup correctly but too many people just want to install it and walk away and lets users do what they want. They then blame the product when the real issue is you need to configure it correctly and maintain it.

    Man makes a good argument. SharePoint is a framework, so there's more to it than simply installing. It can actually be a powerful tool if used correctly. Sure, there are bad frameworks as well, the kind where you gotta hack until it actually does what it says on the box (and then some)... normally stuff sold as a product. Where in facts its a more of a promise. "Yeah, this could do that, after months of configuration."

    Ah, about using SharePoint correctly: 'correctly' needs to happen at both technical and organizational level. I was involved in a SharePoint implementation it was effectively used as a website. No user-specific content, no document saving... just prepared pages and links to document.

    Business strategy decisions led to that. That and a little SAP worship ("all hail the great entity of SAP!").

  • Maupertuis (unregistered)

    Office 2010 supports collaborative edition without Sharepoint over a network share.

    But I am quite sure that sharepoint (or office online) supports this scenario over HTTP as well.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Could everyone with a shitty gimmick poster please just stop it? Nobody gives a shit about "Nagesh" or any of the other stupid fucking characters that you think are so hilarious. They're either too subtle or not enough, they're horrible trolls, and I swear every day it's the same 20 comments by the same gimmick characters over and over and over. Not only were they completely unfunny to begin with, they just get worse over time.

    Just shut the fuck up already, you're the most pathetic examples of programmers with no sense of humor whatsoever. Compared to you, Mandatory Fun Day would be considered funny.

    Now I hope to see yet another iteration of "who are you, I'm the real Nagesh!" for the next forty posts, because that's totally still hilarious.

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    GalacticCowboy:
    TRWTF is going on and on about how broken Office and SVN are, then showing a screenshot of nothing but PDF documents.

    Office 2010 can create PDF file from Word and Excel

    Sure, but it would thoroughly break whatever flimsy "collaboration" features their environment might support. The only difference would be that SVN will warn them from directly overwriting someone else's changes. It still won't let them collaborate on a single document, and even if it did, an exported PDF wouldn't work.

  • PinkyAndTheBrainFan187 (unregistered)

    TRWTF is how fucking many of you "intelligent professionals" can't grok sarcasm. I mean...seriously? Or is today the day everyone got together to troll me, by acting like retarded 5 year olds?

  • (cs)

    What does "copious amount of training" mean again? Is that a lot of training, or a little?

  • (cs) in reply to edhardy
  • (cs) in reply to Scarlet Manuka
    Scarlet Manuka:
    rudraigh:
    Wait ... what? Ok, which is "glitchy"? Office or the SVN? A lot of words are used in convincing us that Office is glitchy (999 times out of 1000 it's user error) but the story is titled "The Glitchy SVN". At no point in the story is it explained how SVN is glitchy, only that the users are clueless and in bad need of training.

    Once again, TRWTF is the story itself.

    No, TRWTF is readers such as yourself who can't understand the story.

    HR were convinced that Office had to be glitchy, because of course the problems they had couldn't be their fault. To shut them up, IT set them up with SVN so they could restore old versions of documents whenever they had problems (i.e. screwed things up again). This worked, to the extent that it made HR happy and got them off IT's back. In fact it made HR so happy that Accounting decided they wanted some of whatever it was that HR was smoking. When IT went to copy HR's setup for Accounting, they found that HR had done weird things with it (not really surprising: users who screw up using Office will also screw up using SVN).

    But it obviously couldn't have been the users' fault, just like the earlier problems with Office couldn't have been their fault. So clearly it must be SVN that's glitchy...

    (If you're still confused, the parts of the story that blame the software are sarcasm. The HR users refused to accept that the problems they had were due to user error; the only cause they would accept was software error. So from their point of view, every issue had to be an indication of glitchy software. In both cases, though, it was just the users not knowing what they were doing. Is that clear enough now?)

    Gatesy:
    I think the version they had must be the same version that is used to write these articles. It seems words often go missing:
    Nah, that's just the glitchy editor.
    I heard it's a bug in HTML itself.
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    Quoting for support and to increase the hits on this spammers address. Kill, spambots, kill!
  • trwtf (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Could everyone with a shitty gimmick poster please just stop it? Nobody gives a shit about "Nagesh" or any of the other stupid fucking characters that you think are so hilarious.
    I agree that Nagesh is a dumb parody of himself and should just shut up or fuck off. And fake boog/frits should have realised that the joke wore thin a long time ago. Other than that, I don't have a problem with the colorful characters we have round these parts.

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