10.2. The SharePoint Way
The solutions described in the previous section can be provided with the WSS 3.0 (that is right, the free version of SharePoint). To make the solution complete, you need MS Office 2007, but even with earlier Office versions, you can go a long way. The recommendation is that users who actively update documents have MS Office 2007, or at least MS Office 2003, but users who read and act on these documents can do so with MS Office 2002 or even MS Office 2000.
The features described in this section are available for both MOSS and WSS, meaning that this can be done in any type of site, including intranet portal sites and team sites. But you may remember from previous chapters that collaborating should be done in team sites, so even if you have MOSS installed, you will most likely end up implementing these solutions in a team site.
The basic structure for file and document management is SharePoint's Document Libraries. It provides you with the following built-in features:
Storing any type of file: Note that there is a global setting in SharePoint that controls what file types that SharePoint does not allow; see the following section on how to change that setting.
Built-in version history: This is disabled by default, but when enabled it automatically keeps track of all updates of each file in the document library. You can choose between a simple version history, just keeping track of the time and date for each version, or a version history, keeping track of both ...
