WebDAV -- With a silent V?

I’ve spent the last few days looking at document management systems, versioning and work-flow applications, while I’m happy enough putting my own scribbles under CVS (I’ve not yet drunk from the Subversion Koolaid) a number of my less techy co-workers need a solution that fits them better.

After some digging around I started to eval WebDAV, it’s used by Apple for shared calendaring, MS Word has WebDAV support and there was an Apache module; very promising. For those unfamiliar with the acronym it expands to “Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning”; except it doesn’t have versioning.

I’ll repeat that for the audience, which I noticed hit 23 last week, the Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol doesn’t cover versioning. A separate protocol, DeltaV is required to sit on top of WebDAV to get any kind of versioning. So if you find yourself in the same boat as me stop wondering how you get Word to increment a version number on the server, it doesn’t.