I have periodically come across the name "WebDAV" without having any idea what it was, so today, after running across the word twice in a matter of a few minutes, I decided it was time to learn more about it. It turns out that WebDAV is a standard that builds upon the HTTP standard to provided support for collaborative maintenance of documents [WebDAV].

Without WebDAV or some similar tool, collaboration on a document can be very cumbersome. The parties involved are required to email to each other any changes they make, they must merge changes manually, manage multiple versions and other perform tedious tasks. This can be both a time consuming and error prone way of working on a document. WebDAV provides a means of hosting a document on a web server so that it can be shared among the collaborators. When an individual is editing, a lock is placed on the document. Any other parties involved must wait for the lock to be removed before they are allowed to make modifications. Because only one person can edit the document at a time, errors can be avoided because there is never any need to merge changes that were made concurrently to different versions of the same document. Using WebDAV, all users will always have the most up-to-date version of the document available to them.

There are other tools that perform these types of task. In particular, software developers have been using version control software for years. CVS is one of the most used tools of this nature and a cornerstone of open-source software development. However, though CVS is much more powerful than WebDAV, the simplicity of WebDAV opens up document control to a much wider audience. 10:51:05 AM