SharePoint 2010 - Document Management - Part 1 ~ Microsoft..what else?

Introduction
I would like to dedicate a couple of articles about the document management functionalities in SharePoint 2010. I regularly teach end users in using SharePoint 2010. They are used to work with file shares and folders and are completely new to the concept of document libraries, views and metadata. I always like to show them what an improvement SharePoint is compared to file shares.

There are multiple articles and blogs about this subject and for non SharePoint newbies there is maybe no new information. I am sure that there are still people out there who don't know the (all) DM features and like to know more about it. I am also going to include tips and tricks so maybe even the non newbies will learn something ;-)

I want to address the following DM components:

Metadata
Office integration
Security
Workflow
Collaboration
Versioning
Templates

In this blog I would like to start by talking about Office integration.

Office integration

You can open and edit Office documents in the browser or open the documents in the Office client application. To be able to open and edit Office documents in the browser the Office Web Apps need to be installed and activated. Are you using SharePoint Online? You have to be sure that the Office Web Apps are included in your license package and also attach the license to the users.

The Office Web Apps are a powerful and useful feature in SharePoint 2010. The major advantage is that you don't need a local Office client, such as Word, to open and edit the document. This can be done by the browser only! This means that you can view documents from every computer when you have a browser and internet connection of course ;-). It is also easy to edit a document in the browser. The following screenshot shows an example:

There are fewer options but I think that is no a major problem for most users because most of the time users want to edit the text and nothing more. I still hope that in the future the options will get closer to the on premise version. Looking how Microsoft is trying to get SharePoint Online to have the same functionalities as SharePoint On Premise this will probably happen.

Metadata and Office

Office documents are stored in a SharePoint document library. The document libraries will always use metadata such as the document creation and modification date or the version. This metadata is also available within the Office document. Let's look at the following example:

There is basic information such as pages and words but there is also the custom metadata column I created, called: Category. I created this column in the document library and now it's also saved as document property. That is pretty cool. I can change additional properties by clicking at Properties and Advanced Properties:

If I am correct fields such as Keywords should be indexed by the SharePoint search engine. That makes this document more 'findable' within the search results.

Office 2010 co-authoring

Another really cool feature is co-authoring. You can now work together, at the same time, in Office documents! I have done this for Word and it works really well. The Word document shows the co-authoring as following (I had to borrow these screen-shots from the Internet because I had no time to simulate this with a co-worker):

As you can see there is no way to change each other text because the paragraph is blocked. You can also see by whom. Nice!

The user names are displayed. I hope you have Lync because now you can start a chat and talk about the changes you are making to the document. Collaboration at it's best!

There are a couple of things you need to consider:

You can work together in the Office client applications such as PowerPoint and Word.
You can only use the Excel Web App for co-authoring.
An OneNote book needs to be published to SharePoint before you can use the co-authoring feature.

The next version of SharePoint and Office will probably support co-authoring in the Excel client application.

Tips and tricks

I can advise the following tips and tricks:

Always check if the Office Web Apps are activated at the Site Collection level.
The advanced settings of the document library contain the option Opening documents in browser, you can set this at Yes so you guarantee that documents are opened in the browser.
Are you using SharePoint Online? Be sure that you have the Office Web Apps license and don't forget to attach it to the user(s).
The co-authoring can only work if the check out option is disabled. So be sure that option is deactivated in the versioning settings.