Allowing entire team to edit a document together (Part 2)
In Part 1, I have attempted to explain the different kinds of sites you can create in WSS 2003. I have also “said” that to allow entire team to edit the same document at the same time, you need document workspaces.
Today, we will be exploring what are the steps required to enable collaboration between the team members by allowing team members to work on the same document together. I will be assuming that readers have basic experience in using WSS 2003, document library and Word 2003.
Creation of Document
As you probably would have known, you can create a new document in Word itself, or by clicking “New Document” icon in the document library. Both ways have little impact on collaboration as the document still exists on the creator’s hard disk, and is not available for sharing. The creator has to upload the document into the document library before any form of collaboration can take place.
While it is possible to upload a blank document, I would advice against it. To have a meaningful collaboration, it is best to have the structure of the document defined before sharing the document. At the very least, type in the different section headers / section titles and then upload the document.
Let the Collaboration Begin!
Once the document is uploaded, each team member has to navigate to the document library via Internet Explorer. I have not tried this on FireFox, but you are welcome to try. From the document’s context menu in the document library, select “Edit in Microsoft Office Word”. Clicking on the document link, or opening the document directly in Word will not enable collaboration as the javascript passes some information to Word.
After going pass the security prompt, the document should be opened up in Word with the Shared Workspace pane showing on the right. If it isn’t, please select [Tools] -> [Shared Workspace] to make the pane appear.
The pane shows the current site the document resides in, and 6 icons below it. I won’t go into each of the icons as it is not in the scope of this article. Click on the Documents icon as shown in the screenshot below, and the pane will show you the list of documents in the document library.
In my case, there is only one document in the library. Notice that the current document has additional text which reads “(Currently Open Document)”
At this point, Word has applied a write lock on the document. This means that team members who open the document will be opening it in read-only mode. Hence the steps in this section should be completed one member at a time.
Next, bring your mouse pointer over the document and you will notice that there is a context menu. Bring up the context menu and select “Save Updatable Copy”. The system will ask where you would like to save it to.
So what is happening here? Once you click save from the save dialog, Word is making a copy of the document into the location which you have specified earlier. Not only that, Word is also saving key information about the workspace into the document as well. At the same time, Word is also releasing the write lock on the copy in the document library.
What do I do when the “Save Updatable Copy” is not available? There are two possible causes.
- The document in the document library is locked by someone else. There isn’t much you could do but to wait for the lock on the document to be released.
- You are accessing the site via Internet, and it is not in your trusted zone. This means that collaboration cannot happen over the internet. What you can do is to add the site into your trusted zone and you should be able to save an updatable copy.
After you have told the Word where to save a local copy, Word will check for any updates from the workspace and save a local copy. Then it will close the workspace copy, and reopen the local copy. Your “Shared Workspace” pane will now be back to the members list. Click on the document list once more, and notice that the text below the document name now reads “(Workspace Copy)”. I don’t know why it is named that way even though you are now using your local copy. Anyway, just take note of the change.
Now you are ready to start collaborating with your team members.
Hmm, Part 2 seems to be pretty long now. Let’s stop here for the moment, and in Part 3, we will look see how changes made by different members are consolidated back to the workspace copy.