A Version Control system lets you manage multiple versions of the same document, allowing team members to work on the same document without overwriting each other's changes, reverting back to old versions and keeping track of the life cycle of every single document.

If you're a Marketer, Copywriter or Excel junky, the obvious choice is Google Docs.
Google Docs is an excellent live version control system that offers all the features I mentioned and more for absolutely free.

Google Docs can handle documents and spreadsheets.

If you're a programmer, there are plenty of version control systems you can choose from:

* First generation CVS with no atomicity
* Second generation Commercial systems like Perforce or open source Subversion
* or Third generation distributed version control systems with offline commits like Git

(We'll cover the differences between the different systems and the one we ended up going with in a future post)

How do you know it's time to use version control?

When your directory structure looks something like this

Hey, how'd you get a copy of my folders? ;)