I'm working on something new in this field and would love to hear from people with interesting use-cases (and tales of woe about current tools). Sadly I don't

I'm working on something new in this field and would love to hear from people with interesting use-cases (and tales of woe about current tools). Sadly I don't think diffing & merging of art assets will ever become viable and locking can only work if your assets are controlled at an OS level. The simplest solution is to hide a file if it's locked. Perforce is not good at dealing with large assets one artist uploading 1 video file can grind 300 other people to a halt. I know this from bitter experience. You can solve it to a degree using standing servers - but it's tricky and expensive to get right. Fuse is interesting but doesn't work with Windows. WebDAV is old and cranky and half broken. Anything that saves immediately will lock your editing software up while the file travels over the network (and with art files that can be minutes! (think video)). Dropbox is the strongest contender here as they allow a quick save followed by a slow sync. Sparkleshare has the right idea and working Windows client (it uses Git behind the scenes so isn't really suitable for video assets). Camlistore is an exciting technology based on the Plan9 file system (and Git) it should cope with large files in theory though I haven't stress tested it. It's still young and there isn't a good visual client yet. I'm coming at this problem from the world of D.A.M. (yuck) but worked for years in the AAA Games industry (many, many, giant art assets). Traditional DAMs have never been any good at dealing with assets still in development. Hopefully we can change that, however there are so many problems to overcome (see above) that its unsurprising no-one has managed it yet. Drop me a line if you have any useful/interesting use cases.