Versioning

A friend runs (ran, actually, but that's another story) a small office with about 5 staff. They would each access a spreadsheet to make small updates occasionally throughout the day. At the time they didn't have a network, so they were literally taking a USB flash drive from computer to computer to make changes.

After I helped him setup his network, the problem of versioning came up.

I told my friend to keep the spreadsheet on one computer (one that stays on all day long) and to give the others write access to it. Obviously this is dangerous - if person 1 saves the database while person 2 is working on it, then when person 2 saves he will have overwritten all of person 1's changes. I advised him to give verbal cues to each other, and to instruct the coworkers to open the spreadsheet, make their changes, save and exit immediately after.

Many years ago at uni we used CVS to dump files when a team was working on a project together. After being very suspicious about CVS I ultimately surrendered to it and let it do all the thinking for me, which meant I never learned how it actually did it's magic.

There must be software out there that locks a file when it's in use, allowing read access to multiple people but only write access to one person at a time. Likewise there must be software that automatically updates a file as changes are being made, akin to online games.

What software options are there? How could you handle any/all types of files over a network - pictures, text files etc? How do businesses typically handle this problem?

 

I work in a small office using XP. We have a server and local network running off that.
If I open a document that someone else already has open, I get a message telling me that, and giving options which are, from memory:
Open a Read Only copy
Open a copy and merge your changes later
Notify when the other person has finished with the file.

 

Does anyone else have some alternatives? Or a direction to look at to setup a file server? I expect the latter is very complex and I really hate databases!