Re: How to control Styles? They seem to propogate like viruses!
- From: "John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:02:22 +1000
Yeah :-)
On 20/6/05 6:29 PM, in article BEDBF698.243F%JustSomeGuy@xxxxxxxxxxxx,
"JustSomeGuy" <JustSomeGuy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As a proposal manager, I got very excited about Sharepoint services, which
> provides super team authoring capabilities, automated version checking, etc.
Yeah, riiiight... SharePoint looks good on paper. The reality is very
different. SharePoint provides just enough functionality to be truly
dangerous, but not enough to make it safe.
SharePoint hands untrained users the keys to the corporate documentation
castle, so now they can do real damage to high-value documents :-)
The designers of SharePoint seem to have missed the fact that in
professional large-scale documentation, project governance is far more
important than collaboration. Most times, my most urgent task is to PREVENT
more than one user from making changes to a document, not to allow it.
> It would have been nice if Microsoft could have anticipated this problem and
> provided some kind of automated style management control or 'style locking'
> as part of the SharePoint rollout. Failing to do that, only creates new
> opportunities for users to get themselves into trouble with Microsoft's
> software tools, and new opportunities to grumble about them! Microsoft's
> Marketing Department should pay closer attention to this kind of thing!
The Marketing Department will never understand the problem, and that's the
problem. Microsoft already has an answer: it's called Visual SourceSafe.
Sure, it has nowhere near the Enterprise-scalable robustness of Documentum
or Lotus Notes, but for the documentation management that most of us need in
the real world, it's the answer to a maiden's prayer. Check-in, Check-out,
version control, branching and combining, roll-forward and roll-back,
persistent locking. Best of all, it's utterly transparent to the users: set
up properly, the end user may never be aware that they are using documents
managed by VSS until they try to do something they shouldn't. Even checking
in and out can be automatic and transparent to the user.
What more do you *REALLY* need??
>
> Getting an entire 'virtual team' to use Word 2003 is impractical in many
> cases; proposal teams are hastily assembled, often including people in other
> locations, in other company divisions, or even in other companies teaming
> with Company A on the proposal.
I just completed a medium-scale proposal today. I know all about it. This
one was a tiddler: only 500 pages. The previous one ran to 2,500 pages
(plus another 2,500 pages of attachments...)
The real answer to all of this is XML, and that's coming as a native file
format in the next version of Word, on both PC and Mac.
Cheers
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
.
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- From: JustSomeGuy
- Re: How to control Styles? They seem to propogate like viruses!
- From: John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]
- Re: How to control Styles? They seem to propogate like viruses!
- From: JustSomeGuy
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