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.

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.

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.