After experiencing a nightmarish week with multiple classes culminating in final projects being due, I am convinced that the way we work is completely and utterly inefficient. All of our classes require group work to complete some sort of deliverable, whether it be a paper or PowerPoint presentation, and the easiest way of tackling this is usually splitting up the work. This, however, yields the problem of document version control.
If six people write 6 different sections of a paper, that means that in the end, six different versions of the paper exist until they all get aggregated. However, as soon as this aggregation takes place, we’re now left with the problem of six people gathered in front of one computer screen to make all further edits. Of course, no one wants to do this so we end up e-mailing out the preliminary aggregated version to everyone in the group, at which point we’re now back to having six different versions of the same paper. Everyone then makes changes on their own personal version, and in the end, we’re left with no way of tying it all back together.
From this past week alone, I probably have at least 10 versions of my paper in my email box, an additional 5 versions on my memory stick, and 4 more on my hard drive. Multiply this by the 6 other people in my group, and it is a version headache. The R drive used to combat this problem by keeping group files in one central location for all to access, but there were no controls surrounding who could view the files on the drive and this led to a “free-for-all” opportunity for cheaters. Bub-bye R drive.
In talking about this with my Dad this weekend, he showed me one of the products that he uses at work to eliminate this problem. It is called DocuShare, and like the R-drive, it allows documents to be stored in one central location. The difference is that it contains the proper controls so that the entire free world can’t view your work. Instead, you can choose who is able to view and edit your files. It also has a version control built in so that it prevents two people from duplicating efforts by editing the same file at the same time. If a file is in use by another person, the second person attempting to access it can only open a “read-only” version and cannot make any edits to the master until it is checked back into the system by the first user. This eliminates all sorts of problems such as group members forgetting to send out the most recent version of their work while others are wasting time making edits to old versions that have become obsolete.
If the Business School expects to continue facilitating a group-work friendly environment, there needs to be one central, controlled data sharing repository, and something like DocuShare may be the solution.
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