Allowing entire team to edit a document together (Part 3)
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.
In Part 2, we have explored what are the steps required to enable collaboration between the team members by allowing team members to work on the same document together.
Today, we will explore how we can consolidate all the changes made by different parties.
Scenario Painting
Let’s paint a scenario to make things a bit easier to comprehend. I’ll be using SgDotNet, the only .Net user group in Singapore as an example. Let’s just pretend we are drafting out a new vision and mission for SgDotNet (SGDN). There are three leads running SgDotNet, Icelava (Aaron Seet), Microlau (Alvin Lau) and myself.
For the purpose of this article, we will pretend that I’m working with Microlau on the draft. So both of us has fired up Microsoft Word with the Vision document, and are at where Part 2 stops.
Editing the Document
Following the advice I have given in Part 2, Microlau and I will be editing different part of the document. He will be brainstorming the Vision, while I brainstorm the Mission.
Below are two screen shots showing the changes that are made. The “classic” Windows XP window is Microlau’s screen, while mine… (Please don’t kill me! :p)
Microlau’s changes
Kit Kai’s changes
Can you spot the changes? Well, an additional statement is added to the end of each section.
Saving the Changes
Microlau is smarter than me, so he hits the save button and save the document first. Word detects that the document has information about the workspace. So Word uses the Shared Workspace pane to tell him that the workspace copy has not been updated, asked him if he would like to update it.
Microlau wants me to see the changes, so he clicks the “Update Workspace Copy” link.
Meanwhile, I am still happily making changes to the document. After a few minutes (depending on your settings), a popup suddenly appears, informing that Microlau has updated the document. What happens now? Will I lose the changes that I have made to the document?
Well, I can click “Open Updated Copy” and lose all the changes I have made, but I decided to continue working on the document. When I have finish authoring the document, I hit the save button. Word, which also detects that the document contains workspace information, then informs me that my changes conflict with Microlau’s.
So I click on “Document Updates…” link and I’m presented with three options; “Merge”, “Compare” or “Replace”. I didn’t want Microlau’s effort to go down the drain, so I select Merge. Word will turn on tracking, and all changes made by both parties are tracked. The only short coming of this is Word might not recognise which changes are made by Microlau, which changes are made by me.
At this point of time, the UI might be a bit misleading, offering you no hints at all on what you should do next. Basically, after Word consolidates the changes using the merge function, you need to review the document and save it. If you are not happy with what Word did, you can either compare, or choose to keep either the workspace copy, or your copy.
So after I have reviewed the changes Microlau has made, I save the document, and update the workspace copy. In a few minutes, Microlau will also receive the same notification message, and he can choose to update his copy as well.
This is how a team can collaborate and work on the same document at the same time. You can also use either MSN, or Live Communication Server, and team members can use Instant Messaging to enhance the collaboration experience.
So what do you do with the local copy that was created in Part 2? I’ll leave it to Part 4.