Allowing entire team to edit a document together (Part 1)
Introduction
Microsoft Window SharePoint Services 2003 provides two way of editing the document. One way is to check out the document, the other way allows many people to edit the same document at the same time. In this article, we will be discussing how to create the environment.
Sites or Workspaces
WSS comes with a few templates, but they can generally be classified into three categories; Standard Site, Document Workspaces or Meeting Workspaces.
Standard Site is a name I shall use to classify the Team Site template. Whenever you define a new site template using Caml, it normally falls into this category.
Meeting Workspaces are workspaces where members can get together to discuss some stuff. When you create an appointment in Outlook 2003, you can also instruct Outlook to create a meeting workspace. I have not worked heavily on meeting workspaces, so I can’t really write much about it.
Document Workspaces are sites that allows members to collaborate together to complete a document. It looks almost like a team site template except for a members webpart instead of a image webpart. However, if you want more than one person to edit the same document together, you will need a document workspace. Creating a document workspace is almost the same as creating a Team Site, just select “Document Workspace” at the template selection screen.
What do I do to existing sites?
If your entire WSS site is powered by Team Sites, and you need to allow more than one person to edit the same document together, what are your options? Well, when you mouse over the document, you can actually create a document workspace from the context menu.
After you select the option, what happens behind the scenes are, a document workspace is created using the document name, and a copy of the document is placed in the document library of the workspace. From then on, you can edit the document together with your team, which we will discuss in part 2. After you are done with the editing, you can publish the document back to it source, and the document workspace will be deleted.
The only thing I don’t like about this method is you will have a document workspace for every document you are editing, which is not neat, IMHO. Hence ever since I discovered this feature, I didn’t create any more team sites as I am not aware of any disadvantages of creating document workspaces.
But for those with existing sites with lots of documents, this might be a solution other than migrating the documents into a document workspace site.
Watch out for part 2, which we will discuss how we can allow the entire team to edit the same document together.