Version Control for Asynchronous Group Work 1 Introduction

Controlling the development of di erent versions of a document can be a complex task, even for a single author to handle. This task is likely to become more complex as the number of authors increases, and more complex still if those authors are distributed geographically with only limited means of communication, such as electronic mail, to connect them. If this last situation makes version control di cult to manage it also makes it very necessary. This paper looks at the issue of version control comparing single and multiple user situations. The aim is to focus on requirements for version control that will assist asynchronous distributed group writing. The paper concludes with an informal description of MSC, a multiple-source control system which seeks to ful ll these requirements.