OK, I've read up on best practices for sharing Word templates over the
network, and I'm rather disappointed at the hoops you have to jump
through. It's hard to believe that in order to be able to update a
template on the network you either need to insist on users maintaining
their own local copies of the templates, or you need to have everyone
close every document that could be based upon these templates. IMHO
that's bogus. Yes, I know that you can automatically update users'
private template copies with login scripts and such, but that's still
bogus. Whatever.

If there's some way now to prevent templates from being locked, then
please let me know. Assuming not, I have a few other questions.

1) I'm baffled by the file locking in the first place. If I rename
the template on the network that a document is based upon, the document
still seems to open just fine. What am I missing? If it's just not
having the capability of storing style changes in the template unless
it can be located, then that's fine, because I wouldn't want people
changing these shared templates anyway.

2) People have already created several documents based upon templates
located on network drives. If we want to prevent these documents from
locking the templates on the network in the future, do we now need to
update all of these documents to point to a local version of the
template? If so, could someone please provide me with the steps for
doing this? I *think* I have a general idea how this would be done,
but I don't want to screw it up.

3) I've read about the techniques for copying templates locally using
login scripts. These are tightly controlled by our IS department, and
I'm not sure they would make group-specific changes for stuff like
this. Besides, some people just lock their desktops and don't logoff
for days or even weeks. I'm kind of liking a scheme involving a
simple front end batch scripts that copy templates locally and then
open MS Word using the new templates (e.g., perhaps one script per
template). Does anyone see any issues with this scheme?

4) So what is to prevent someone from using the templates directly from
the network drive as they're doing now? Note also that we need to
have the templates stored on a network drive, and document authors also
need write access to the drive. That's because we maintain our
document templates with Visual SourceSafe, and the network drive
provides a location for VSS to shadow template changes. People besides
myself might be making changes to the template, so we all need write
access to the shadow location. I make this point because we can't
just change access to the network drive to read-only in an attempt to
work around this problem. (And I'm not sure that that would prevent
the templates from being locked anyway.)