Essential SharePoint

Improving Collaboration

The main difference between my site and the W3C site is that mine contains mostly Word documents, while their site is mostly HTML files. That means my users must have Word to view the files in Figure 1-2, but it also means that those users can open those files directly from the web site and make changes if they have permission.

In fact, my editors don't even need to open my site to make changes. They can open the Word files listed in Figure 1-2 and save them to their own computers as linked documents; then whenever they open their local copy, it is automatically refreshed with changes from the SharePoint site. Similarly, any changes they make to the files are sent to SharePoint when they close their local copy, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3 illustrates a distributed file system where O'Reilly (my publisher) can share access to the files I am working on, even though I live in Florida, and they are in Massachusetts and California (and sometimes in between).

The files are synchronized over the Internet whenever the file is opened or closed. If Simon (my editor) finds himself somewhere without a good network connection, however, he can cancel the updates but still work on the file—as long as he promises to synchronize it later!

Tip

For me, SharePoint replaced zipping files and emailing them as they were completed, reviewed, or changed, because very large zip files sometimes bounced back from the mail server—putting the "dead" in deadline.

Figure 1-3. Local copies ...