Check Out option

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rob Hogan
  • Start date Start date
R

Rob Hogan

Perhaps this is already integrated into MS Word, I am not sure. We have a
company manual (created in word) that needs to be available for all to read
and for many people to make changes to it. We curently have this stored on a
shared network drive (Windows 2000 Server). The problem we have is that more
than one person will occasionally open it to make changes at the same time,
obviously this is a disaster because when the last person to save the file
does so, it eliminated the changes that the first person who saved the file
had done. Is the some sort of functionality within Word (or Office) to
handle this scenario? If not, does anyone know of a third party application
that might assist in this? Oh, by the way...we use Office version 2000, XP,
& 2003. Hopefully this would be available to work with all of these but we
would not be against upgrading key users if necessary.

Thanks,
Rob
 
Hi, Rob,

There isn't anything directly in Office to do this. I'll guess that your
company doesn't develop software, so you probably don't have Visual
SourceSafe, Microsoft's source-control product.

What you're looking for is generally called a "document control system" or a
"revision control system." There's a free open-source one available at
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/RCS/, and searching at Google turns
up a number of others, both free and commercial. If you find one that seems
to fit your needs, be sure to give it a good shake-out trial -- sometimes
the little details are hard to live with.
 
Hi Rob,

If you could upgrade everyone to Office 2003 you might want to look at the
new Sharepoint stuff. I think that enables document sharing fairly well, even
to the point of allowing users to integrate changes done by multiple users.
The problem we have is that more
than one person will occasionally open it to make changes at the same time,
obviously this is a disaster because when the last person to save the file
does so, it eliminated the changes that the first person who saved the file
had done. Is the some sort of functionality within Word (or Office) to
handle this scenario? If not, does anyone know of a third party application
that might assist in this? Oh, by the way...we use Office version 2000, XP,
& 2003.
Click to expand...

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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