Collaborating on documents

[Stephen]

I hate to post this because I fear the answer is a simple
one, but here goes: What are the best options in Word '02
for a group of workers who need to work on a set of
documents? That is, while they may be the only person
working on the file, there is also a good possibility
that a few co-workers may need/want to edit the same file
concurrently. I've noticed that the MVP's don't seem to
care for the Master Document feature (there's an
understatement!). Is a network share as a repository the
solution, with all documents having the Track Changes
setting on? If so, do the MVP's have any sites they can
recommend where I could read up on the Track Changes
feature? Also, what is the current status of MS' scrubber
that they put out for that tool?

Many thanks!

Stephen

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Stephen

For what it's worth, I don't think this is a simple question at all!

The Master Document functionality isn't really relevant to your issue.
It's about creating one big document out of several small ones.

In Word 2002, the best system I ever experienced for allowing several
people to work on several documents together was an office with a
network drive which everyone could see. Documents were saved on that
network drive. People used track changes and comments to make their
changes and to communicate with others. When someone made big changes,
they would save the document with a new name (eg
Chapter1_Bill_24Jan04.doc and then the next day it might be saved as
Chapter1_Susan_25Jan04). The internal rule was to move old documents to
an "Old Versions" folder that was a sub-folder of the working folder.

There was also quite a lot of email communication saying things like
"I've finished my changes in Chapter 2. Now Bill can do his changes." or
"Mary, would you let me know when you're ready for me to work on Chapter
3?". So personal co-operation was important.

However, it's never been possible for two people to edit a Word document
simultaneously. You have to take turns. And if you try to open a
document that is already open by someone else, Windows will tell you
that it is in use.

If you had Office 2003 and Windows Server 2003, you could use Windows
Sharepoint Services, which is very cool, and has ways to help this
process out. Even with Office 2002, if you had Windows Server 2003, you
could use WSS, but some of the collaboration functionality would not be
available from within Word 2002.

I will be interested to hear if others have different ways of managing
the many-people-working-on-many-documents issue.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Rob Schneider]

Shauna,

In addition to the wise words you provide, if at all possible (and I
know this means more software which means not viable for some), having
some sort of file repository that does "check in/out" of files for
version management stops people clobbering each other's versions, and
allows going back to previous versions relatively easily. My formula
for "trouble" associated with collaboration on documents is

trouble factor = (number of people involved) ** 2

My perception is that with version control repository, you can remove
the exponent.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT]

Hi Rob

I think the formula should have been

trouble factor = (number of people involved) ^2
--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.
Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Rob Schneider]

This might be new to you, but ** is commonly used in many (most?)
programming languages for exponentiation. Yes, ^ used in VB. Off the
top of my head can't think of any other languages where ^ used. Since I
don't use VB very much I forgot to "translate" ** to ^ for this NG.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms




Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACTERS FROM EMAIL ADDRESS
wrote:

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP - DELETE UPPERCASE CHARACT]

Hi Rob,

Not only VB, also Excel

--
Please post any further questions or followup to the newsgroups for the
benefit of others who may be interested. Unsolicited questions forwarded
directly to me will only be answered on a paid consulting basis.
Hope this helps
Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Stephen]

Thanks for all of the help guys. Sorry for the delay in
getting back to the group.