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#1
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Collaboration between remote offices
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. |
#2
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Hi
If you are using Windows Server 2003, you might like to investigate using Windows Sharepoint Services. It allows you to save files in a document library, and to "check out" a file so that no-one else can work on it till you are finished with it. Hope this helps. Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP. http://www.shaunakelly.com/word "NEI" wrote in message ... 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. |
#3
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Thanks, Shauna! We'd talked about SharePoint in the past, so we just
scheduled a meeting with our IT support to discuss it further. If anyone has other complementary ideas, please feel free to share them. Thanks, Mike "Shauna Kelly" wrote in message ... Hi If you are using Windows Server 2003, you might like to investigate using Windows Sharepoint Services. It allows you to save files in a document library, and to "check out" a file so that no-one else can work on it till you are finished with it. Hope this helps. Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP. http://www.shaunakelly.com/word "NEI" wrote in message ... 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. |
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