So we have great documents, but as soon as often they are shares, they get out of date. Examples of this are

• price lists
• product information
• shared resources list

To get over this we are going to look at Document Workspaces in CompanyWeb and Office 2003.

Let’s start at the beginning, no matter what I tell people, they do not like going to a web site to load, upload a file etc. Also, setting user permissions is a nightmare and they might even just start passing round usernames and passwords.

The most obvious answer for most people is to use e-mail.  The very process of creating an e-mail with an attachment and marking it as a live attachment creates a document workspace.  It is secured to only those people that the e-mail goes to and the document knows where it came from, so will try ot update the site or get updates from the site when saved and loaded.

This ensures that any document sent this way, or using a document work group will auto-update. Documents stored on SharePoint sites like to auto update. Each time the document is saved to the site, a new version is created, so there is an audit trail.  They can be checked in and out to provide greater controll over editing and approval can be applied if desired to the publication process.

To test this yourself, go to your SBS connected machine, open a new mail in Outlook and type a few names in the too line.  Then type something like "updated documents for everyone to see" in the subject line. Then choose file from the insert menu and insert a file from the documents folder. The task pane should appear on the right and click live attachment.  If it does not appear, then press the attachment options button next to the file inserted. Click Shared Attachment.

Notice the extra text inthe e-mail - the link is where your document store will be created.

Note the web site is created once the file is sent and it is secured by the people in the to & cc lines.

Once this has been sent, go to the sent items in outlook at click the link to open up the intranet site. You may have to refresh a few times before the site is fully populated. Go back to the e-mail and double click the attachment – it should show the task panel with a get updates button, show the people who have access to the document. You can talk about the fact that the document will try to auto update if possible, ending the problems around people keeping up to date, as everytime they open the document it will try to update. It can be made that this is accessable outside the network (so over the internet) by choosing to publish to the site https://mycompany.com:444.

Try saving the file to your hard disk, making some changes and closing word or excel - see how simple this is.

In the next item I will write, I will tell you how to get the system to tell people that the file has been updated.

Some of this can be seen by going to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP063468651033.aspx or watching the video at http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT010937971033

ttfn

David