Discussion: Digital Mapping Library

Does anyone have any best practices for digital map repositories? Google Docs? Sharepoint? Dropbox? Also, do you have naming rules (last date revised). Looking for best practices to make sure that any event uses the most current map - also check out, check in ideas.

Interested in this as well. We did consider versioning software, but it never got legs, perhaps because it was too much overkill.

Brian, you might have already seen this, but there's a bit of previous discussion here: http://ar.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/mes...

I did some research on the tool that was suggested at our annual meeting ("GitHub"), and it doesn't seem appropriate.

"Huddle" looks interesting, but it's really expensive. A free version of that would be perfect. (They offer discounted service to selected non-profits.)

"Basecamp" looks good, too, and less expensive ($20 / month).

I actually did some preliminary research into this last year, among some friends. Here's the input I received (below). I'll look into Alfresco Community Edition, which I think is free if installed and hosted on the RMOC site.

Brooke: Is there such a thing as a free, web-based clone of Sharepoint? (Something a non-profit group could use as a document repository -- password protected, with version tracking, check-out capability, etc.?)

Eric: I don't know if it has all the sharepoint features, but how about basecamp? It certainly has a free tier.

Dave: Sharepoint... shudder. Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) is the closest thing I can think of off-hand.

Dave: I don't think G-drive does actual version control, but you can go back in history (up to 30 days) and save specific revisions. Don't know if it can lock or merge edits from possible multiple simultaneous edits. You'd have to play with that. It has access control.

Bill: How much like SharePoint do you need and do you want a hosted or self-managed solution? For hosted solutions, there are dozens of free content management systems that can be repurposed for basic DMS.

Keith: I know nothing about this product, but I heard yesterday about a free product called Al Fresco for Doc Mgmt that recently beat out Sharepoint in a head to head comparison at my company.

Adam: Not a fan of Google Drive. Their doc & sheet programs pale compared to Word & Excel. Copying out of them to others is a pain. As far as uploading externally generated files, it lets you upload multiple copies of the same named file without asking if you want to overwrite.

Nat: Alfresco does fit the bill... and if you keep it under 10 GB, you can use the Alfresco Cloud for free. Alternatively get the Community edition and install yourself. I used it a few years ago to some extent - was a bit annoying to customize due to lack of documentation, but worked fairly well. Now I just use Alfresco Cloud, and not very much, but it's free and decent.

Alison: DROPBOX! You all just need a free account and then one of you makes a folder and shares that to everyone you want to. Only the people with the link/e-mailed shared can see it or you can also have a section that is public to everyone. It is free so a certain amount of storage but you gain storage space if like friends join through a link you send out, or a few other things. I have about 2GB on my account right now and haven't paid a cent. We are using it for my engineering design project right now between 6 of us and as long as you save it back into the dropbox folder (You can just have it as a normal folder on your desktop or work online) it will update the doc version for all of you.

Jim: Google drive sucks for this sort of app. It Is excellent for ad hoc collaboration, but they can't even do markups in their word processing program.

Adam: Alison, what happens if someone downloads a doc, but takes a while to work on? By the time they do, and upload it, they may be working on an outdated doc. That's happened to my wife.

Alison: I never work on my docs without saving them in the dropbox file if that makes sense. So anytime I hit save in say word it updates the doc in the dropbox. You do have to be a bit careful about it but generally works not too badly

Adam: Not everyone does that. As I said, people have downloaded docs to work offline. By the time they've gotten around to working on it, the doc may have been updated several times already

Jeff: Alfresco. What is not obvious from their webpage is the "Community Edition" which is source and installer to host your own. So, its free in cost, but has no limits like their hosted version does (file size, total storage size, etc.) I may be interested in helping your non-profit with hosting. I currently host a couple of Joomla already.

Jeff: By biting the bullet and hosting your own, you get a few benefits not available by Dropbox, G-Drive, etc. You can use your own domain name, you get to choose where its hosted (offsite, own servers, etc), you can customize the look and feel (colors, logo, etc), and you really own the content. If you use outside service of any kind, you run the risk that at some point, the service goes away or changes the rules and you might not be able to get all your stuff back (or easily). If hosted on a server you control, at least you know where all the files are and know you can get them back if you change directions years down the road.

I find Dropbox does nearly everything I need - it keeps a version history, it works silently and I can share folders with people easily.

The biggest impediment to its use is people who simply don't understand how it works - they move files out of the Dropbox folder (if I'm stupid enough to give them write access), they add version numbers to files (so you get event1.ppen, event1_v2.2a.ppen, event1_v4.2(20-06-2014)_Kenschanges_AfterCoffeeButBeforeGettingSleep.ppen, which was the idiocy I always wanted Dropbox to solve) and other silliness simply because they don't get the automatic shared folder concept.

Having said that, if you can get people to understand it and use it properly then Dropbox is awesome - I've run it very well in the past when I was mapping an area and the setters wanted to start setting. Master map in Dropbox, shared with the setters, and they point their course files at the Dropbox folder. Then when I update the map, they get it automatically and everyone works on the right version. For the last carnival I was involved in, I refused to email files around - everything was in Dropbox, and my co-setter, controller and IOF advisor all had access to it.

Proper version control (eg. JediVCS, CVS, SVN, GitHub) is pretty pointless with binary files like OCAD, since you can't do version comparison. The learning curve is also so steep for 'normal' users that you'll either break your repo (particularly with git) or the person responsible leaves and no one else understands wtf is going on.

I would love to get proper version control for OCAD!

The professional version with DB object links seems to be required, the alternative is to export every version of the map to a text format like DXF, then run diff or something similar to locate the updates.

The problem is of course that you need to keep the same object order between saves in order to make it possible to detect the actual changes, alternatively you would have to start by sorting the DXF files, putting all objects in a canonical order.

(Based on coordinates?)

I agree with Juffy re DropBox

With our latest map, the mapper has the one copy in his DB, where he is the only one who can write to it. It is then shared to those who need it

DB is also good to use when course setting and controlling, as all involved use the same file

Ocad 11 has the ability to compare in great detail both colors and symbols found in 2 different maps

I wanted to show some illustrations of this process but I am unable to paste the images I copied into this post. Would love to know how to copy and paste images into Attackpoint. Suggestions would be appreciated.

I had made some screen shot from Ocad using Snagit. I then copies them but when I tried pasting in this post no image appeared.

You have to use the html tag. Upload the images somewhere and write in your post:
<img src="theimagelink.whatever"/>