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I know you can use source control software for source code, but can you use it for your technical documents as well? For example, can you store a Word document and it keep a history of changes (I know it has track changes, it’s just and example)? Thank you.
If you are on a Windows platform, then TortoiseSVN has some really useful features that will let you diff (but unfortunately not merge) Word documents. It interacts with an installed Word directly, and when you request a diff it runs a script that loads both documents to compare into Word and uses Word’s built-in document compare to compare them.
With that feature, combined with Subversion’s locking (where editors must request a lock on a document to turn off the read-only flag), I have found it very easy to manage Word documents with Subversion. It’s not quite as convenient as plain text, but when you must produce Word documents it’s certainly doable.
Having said the above, in general terms documents are a product of the software development process and must be version controlled in some way. Otherwise, your process is incomplete.