The TriQuest Team is continually looking for ways to help small businesses improve collaboration in the workplace. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 offers a powerful coauthoring capability for any Microsoft Office 2010 product such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint. This feature makes it possible for multiple people to work on a document at the same time without interfering with each other’s changes.
This may sound like it could turn a document into a giant mess, but SharePoint does have a few tricks to keep it from becoming so. Some of these useful functions are described below:
See everyone who has this document open for editing right now
When a document is managed by Sharepoint, and is opened with Office 2010, an icon displays at the bottom of the screen informing you if any other authors are currently working on the same document. By clicking this icon, you are able to view the names of the users and send a message or email to them.
Lock editing at the paragraph level
To prevent two users from making changes to the same text, this SharePoint feature will lock down the document at the paragraph level in Word, or the cell level in Excel. This means the first person to make changes is the only one who can make changes and save them for that paragraph or cell. The application also marks and displays which author is working on which paragraph or cell.
Update your section only when it’s complete
With this feature other authors cannot see your changes, nor do you see theirs, as you work. When one author completes their current edits and saves the document, all the other authors are notified that those updates are available and then they have the option to see the updates in their own copy of the document right away or wait.
Version control
Perhaps best of all, each change saves as a version in the document's version history. This way the entire team can track all changes made and revert back to older versions if necessary.
So, in the case of a three person team working on a document in Word 2010, each team member can have a specific section they are responsible for, and with coauthoring, each team member can edit their specific section at the exact same time. This eliminates multiple versions being passed back and forth reducing the chance of errors. The additional work of taking all the sections and piecing them together is completely eliminated.
While previous editions of Office included version control, Microsoft Office 2010 with SharePoint is the only version that provides the coauthoring capability.
The TriQuest Technologies team recommends taking advantage of these capabilities to help your business save time and money through improved document collaboration.