Quick show of hands: How many of you have people in your organizations that collaborate on documents using one of these methods:

  • Users e-mail various versions of a document around to one another, and make their specific changes.
  • Everyone creates a small part of a document, and then sends their part to one person that is responsible for compiling the final product.
  • Use a "public" share to store a document and everyone works on the document in that space.

If your users use any of these methods for document collaboration, you're likely very familiar with the shortcomings inherent within. For example, as users e-mail documents around, besides the fact that huge documents are taking unnecessary space in your mail store, you're never sure which version is the most recent. In situations in which a single user is responsible for compiling a final document, the various parts may be seriously inconsistent, leaving that poor user with the job of making the final document look cohesive. Finally, using the "public folder" method introduces the risk that unauthorized people will gain access to information, although with appropriate access rights, this wouldn't be a problem.

So, what do you do? Use a Windows SharePoint Services Document Workspace for document collaboration. With its document sharing capability, check-out feature, access controls and versioning controls, your users can collaborate on documents ensuring security, consistency, and accessible document history.

Prepping SharePoint

For this article, I'm assuming that you have installed Windows SharePoint Services included with Windows Server 2003 R2 and have configured SSL for the site, as I have done in my lab. If you want to quickly add SSL capability to your site and don't want to get a real certificate or build your own certificate authority, use the SelfSSL tool included in the IIS 6.0 resource kit. In order to integrate Word with your new Windows Server with SharePoint, you must have SSL configured, so don't skip this step.

For my lab configuration, I am running the services on a server in a domain named "example" in which I am also running Exchange, which further enhances SharePoint's collaboration capabilities, as you will see in this article. Further, I've added my SharePoint server to the Trusted Sites zone on my workstations. I have also configured SharePoint to allow the creation of sites and workspaces by users assigned to the Contributor and Web Designer roles. You can do this by going to the Modify Site and Workspace Creation page (Home | Site Settings | Configure Site and Workspace Creation) and selecting the checkboxes next to the two Site Group roles indicated above. Click OK when you're done. Now, non-administrative users can create new sites. You'll have to decide on your own if you want to centralize site creation or allow your users to create new document workspaces.

Figure A

Allow these groups to create new sites.

Before you get into the Word portion of this article, you should also create some SharePoint users by going to Home | Site Settings | Manage Users. On this screen, click Add Users. You can add local or domain users. You also need to decide to which roles the new users will be assigned. Click Next.

Figure B

Add a user by user name and assign the role.

On the next screen, unless you've already provided the user's e-mail address or user name, you'll be asked to provide this information. SharePoint also allows you to optionally customize and send a welcome message to the new user. Click Finish when you're done.

Figure C

Provide the user's e-mail address and, optionally, customize and send a welcome message to the user.

That's all I'm going to cover with regard to the server configuration side of this process for now. I'll get into the Word side of things now and address other possible SharePoint tasks as we go along.

Document collaboration using Outlook

There are a number of ways you can collaborate with others using SharePoint. The most common way that collaboration begins is by e-mailing a document in Outlook to someone with whom you want to contribute to your work.

To use this method, after you save your document locally, from Word, choose File | Send To | Mail Recipient (as Attachment). Outlook will open up with a send message window with your document attached to the message. Now, type in the e-mail address of the recipient and then click the Attachment Options button. This opens the Attachment Options task pane in which you can choose to create a SharePoint document workspace and share the document. In Figure D below, you can see what this window looks like for a sample document that I created. Note the "https" prefix in the "Create Document Workspace at" box. Once you have your options selected, click the Send button.

Figure D

When you click Send, you document workspace is created and your partner gets a message.

If the document workspace creation is successful, you'll get a message in your Outlook inbox indicating such. Otherwise, the message will point you to the reason for the failure.

The message recipient gets the message you sent, indicating that he can work on either the local or the shared copy of the document. I'll open up the recipient's message and click on the link to the shared copy of the document, which brings up the "Test3" document workspace, as shown below in Figure E.

Figure E

The "Test3" document workspace.

Note that the member list includes two users -- both the sender and the recipient. You can, of course, send the invitation message to multiple recipients with each name showing up on the member list. Also note that the name of the shared space takes on the name of the Word document that was sent with your attachment. Using this method, you are not able to control the name that SharePoint assigns to the shared workspace.

I'm going to go over other methods for creating document workspaces before I get into updating documents that have already been added to a repository.

Word's collaboration features

You don't have to use Outlook to send a document to get started with document collaboration. Using tools built right into Word, you can create document workspaces on your SharePoint server. Before I get too deep into Word's collaboration features, there is one important point to make: As with the Outlook collaboration method, you need to initially save a local copy of your document after which you can add it to a document workspace on your SharePoint server. Afterwards, when you close and reopen the document, Word will check if your local copy is the latest version and will update it accordingly. SharePoint handles document editing conflicts by asking you which version you want to keep.

There is a key difference in the way that Outlook and Word handle the creation of the document workspace. In Outlook, the document workspace takes on the name of the document itself. When you create a document workspace through Word, you can specify the name of the document workspace while your document itself retains its name inside the workspace.

Word's collaboration features are accessed through Word's Share Workspace task pane accessed at Tools | Shared Workspace. Figure F shows you what the Shared Workspace task pane looks like when you initially open it.

Figure F

Word's Shared Workspace task pane.

To create a new document workspace from within Word and save your document to the new workspace:

  • Save your document.
  • Go to Tools | Shared Workspace.
  • In the Shared Workspace task pane, provide a name for the document workspace.
  • In the Shared Workspace, type the path to your SharePoint server.
  • Click the Create button.

Once your workspace is created, the Shared Workspace task pane changes a little, reflecting the name of the new workspace, and lists the members of the space. Note that there are six tabs in the Shared Workspace pane, with the second from the left highlighted in Figure G. I'll explain the purpose of all six tabs in the next article in this series.

Figure G

The Members tab allows you to add people to your project.

Add members to your project

In the tab shown in Figure G, note the "Add new members" link. You can probably guess that the purpose of this link is to add other people to your project, as you would if you sent these same people an e-mail message in Outlook with your document attached. Upon clicking this button, Word opens the Add New Members dialog box on which you can add users by either e-mail address or user name. Figure H shows you this window while Figure I shows you the information verification window. Click Finish when you're done.

Figure H

Type in the user names or e-mail addresses of the users you wish to invite to your project.

Figure I

In this example, all of the fields were present in Active Directory, so I don't have to provide any more information.

After clicking Finish, Word offers to send an e-mail invitation to these new members.

Figure J

Would you like to send a message to these users?

Visiting the link shown in the message shows the user the new document workspace. The sample workspace I created above is shown in Figure K.

Figure K

The "Testing Stuff" workspace contains a document named "This is a test" and has three members.

Add documents to your project

Not every project consists of a single document. Using Word, you can add multiple documents to a single workspace. To accomplish this:

  • Save the second document locally.
  • Browse to your shared workspace (i.e. visit http://yourserver/name-of-your-space).
  • Click the "Add a new document" link.
  • On the Upload Document window, browse to find your file.
  • On the Upload Document window, click the Save and Close option.

Figure L

Browse to find the file you want to add to the repository.

Figure M

When you're done, the file shows up in the Shared Documents section of your document workspace.

You can also add new documents to the workspace from within Word. I will go over this method for adding new files to the workspace in my next article.

Editing shared documents -- the basics

I'm not going to get into a significant explanation of how documents are manipulated in the shared workspace (I'll do this in my next article and also explain features such as versioning). However, I will show you what happens when you edit a document in the repository.

To do this, I've logged into another machine as "auser", one of the users I assigned to my new document workspace. A document can be opened just by clicking its name in the Shared Documents list you saw in Figure M. From here, you can make any necessary changes to the document. Upon saving the changes, however, you will always get a "Save As" dialog box with the default save location being the document workspace on your SharePoint server.

Figure N

The Save As dialog box when editing a SharePoint-hosted file.

After you save your changes, the "Modified By" column in the Shared Documents list changes to reflect the name of the person that last modified the document.

Summary

This article explained the basic steps to document collaboration using Word and SharePoint. In the next article in this series, I will go over more advanced items, and expand on some of the items I briefly introduced in this article.