This material on VSS is an archive from fall 1998. First I changed jobs so I no longer had an association with VSS. Then after a couple more years I changed careers completely so I wasn't associated with high tech at all. Then after some more time I retired. I've left the VSS material on this site for use by others, even though I no longer remember exactly what it's about or even understand some of it.
This material reflects experience with VSS5. The user interfaces and the feature set in VSS6 were virtually identical, so almost all of this material continued to apply for several years. But I have no detailed knowledge of the user interfaces or feature set of VSS2005, and so don't know which parts of this material still apply.
Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe product, which is included in their Enterprise Developer bundle, is source control software. It's inexpensive compared to some of its competitors, it has a real nice GUI, it's very Windows-like, and can be tightly integrated with other Microsoft development tools.
Back when I was using VSS, my experiences included:
If you wanted a one-liner (sounds clever and has a grain of truth, but is vastly over-simplified) about VSS, you could say that it's "great for developers, not so great for administrators". Another one-liner about VSS is it's "a piece of 80/20 software, it works for 80% of the customers with only 20% of the features".
A source of additional VSS training, VSS-related utlities, and VSS training is Case Extensions.