We're looking for a way to improve our collaboration with our remote
offices. We regularly write reports in Word that are the product of
collaboration from authors in up to three locations. Several times now we
have had problems where a remote worker (working offline because of a slow
connection to the server) has overwritten updated versions of document that
have been modified in our main office (working on the server). This of
course causes frustration, often significant rework, and schedule delays.

Aside from management policies and controls (enforcing how people do their
work, holding people responsible for data losses when they work off of the
server, etc.), we're trying to identify ways to prevent these sorts of
problems from arising from a hardware/software standpoint. Obviously, there
are low-tech tricks of renaming files to indicate that they're in use, such
as moving them to an "In Use" folder or renaming them to indicate that they
are in use. What we're trying to find, though, are tools or techniques to
automate the process.

Does anyone have suggestions about how we might accomplish this? Are there
tools in Windows XP or Word 2003 that would help? Add-ins? Other software?
Anything that works as well as synchronization does, but for remote workers?

Please write back to if possible. Thanks!

Mike Fisher
Northern Economics, Inc.