Bruce If you have beginners, I personally would stick to one that does have a central record somewhere, if you want to support decentralised systems fine, but set it up in a way that the beginners can just log onto the 'central' record and have to 'commit' every change. I have now tried using SVN with at least 3 sets of caving data. Trying to get people to understand a simple update and commit routine is hard enough, without the decentralised options, that I also find confusing. I would only go down that route for expeditions where it is difficult/impossible to talk to the central.
If you need it I have a document showing beginner windows users how to set up tortoiseSVN, but it is a few years only now, so the pictures are certainly not the correct ones Andrew
