<p>Recently developers highlighted that it is bit hard for them to keep track of which document has been updated. And they thus suggested that using SVN to keep track of document changes will be better as they will be able to know if document if being updated when doing checking out of the project. </p>

<p>But i also highlighted the several cons that may occur</p>

<ul>
<li>Binary file using up alot of diskspace everytime word, excel document is commited</li>
<li>Checkout a project will take much more time although we can separate the documents into another project in the repository</li>
<li>It will take time to teach personnel on how to use SVN.</li>
</ul>

<p>Another feature is that for these kind of functional documents, it should be locked while editing.</p>

<p>Anyone have any idea on how to go about it? Or what are the pros and cons to it. Please feel free to share with me.</p>

We use Subversion for document management at work. It works great.
Don't worry about the disk space. Revisions are stored compressed anyway.
Checking out a project with documentation doesn't take much more time than one without. Unless your documents are absolutely huge, this shouldn't be a problem.
Training time is a consideration. Fortunately, TortoiseSVN makes this easy.
To manage Word documents so they can only be edited by one person at a time, use the
```
svn:needs-lock
```
property. This will make the files appear as read-only on a normal checkout, and read-write when a developer has locked them for editing. After commit, the file will be unlocked and read-only again.
An additional benefit of TortoiseSVN is that it can do diffs of Word documents and present the differences in Word itself. This alone is a killer feature for me.