We recently went from Wss 3.0 to SPS 2013 Enterprise. One of the welcome features by the users was the ability to “multi-author” documents. In our Proposal Development area, they would chop up a document and pass out sections to writers. They would then return them to a single person who would reconstruct the document with all the parts.
When I told them they could all work in the same document they were very excited. I did plenty of testing and demos and all went as planned…until…… the real-world implementation of course.
For some, multi-authoring worked perfectly… then the phone call. Hey Bill, “I get this box when I try to edit a document”.
I read everything… no it’s not checked out…. if they forget to close it and shut down it’s locked for a certain period of time… something about WebDav.. all kinds of explainations except the one I needed to hear. Finally, the simplest of reasons why this was happening.
“Multi-Authoring is only supported in .docx files“. Sure enough, they were using templates that were created with the .doc extension. I saved them as .docx and multi-authoring worked as advertised.
Sometimes it’s something simple.