One of the questions most customers ask me regarding the collaborative work of documents is if more than one person can edit the same document at the same time. The classic approach using Sharepoint was to edit a document from a document library and this would enable you to do your work while everybody else would have access to a read-only version.
With the release of Office 2010 Microsoft enabled a very cool functionality, the co-authoring! Basically this enables a document to be edited by more than one person at the same time, restricting the zone that is being edited and allowing every other part of the document to be edited by someone else. Pretty cool, right?
Using Sharepoint there are a few configurations you have to set to have this working smoothly:
- Set the correct permissions to the document library
- Enable versioning major and minor versions. If you are using Onenote documents enable only major versions (note: Onenote does autosave and this can result in synch problems with minor versions).
- Do NOT require Check Out to edit a document
after this you can test yourself!
A simple but very useful functionality for everyone that needs to work in a collaborative way in the same documents, like reports or proposals.
why “Onenote documents enable only major versions” ?
Hi Mike,
the OneNote does not have the option of save, therefore in reality it autosaves, this can promote synch failures due to minor versioning in Sharepoint.
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