Basic Question & Scenario

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sternfan

Hi all - I've been tinkering/testing Alfresco off and on for a few days and am getting confused.  I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to do, someone can tell me if this is possible and some hints as to how to accomplish…

Scenario - I have some documents that multiple users have to edit (each user has a section of the document that is theirs).  Currently what happens is one person starts the doc, does their section and then emails it to whomever so they can do their section.  I am looking for a better solution.

One day I was sending an attachment (outlook 2003) - looked into "Attachment Options" and the related "Document Workspace."  After a quick google search, I found Alfresco. 

So my Q - Can a document be shared with Alfresco so that multiple users can edit it concurrently?  Are there basic instructions on making this work?  Any gotchas?  I have read much of the help, but having no experience with Sharepoint etc - much of it is lost on me.

Thanks,
Rob

mrogers

You can't easily update the same document in parallel, that just creates a merge problem that needs to be resolved at some point.

Alfresco provides a couple of bits of functionaility that may be useful for your scenario, the first is to be able to lock a document so that only a single person can update it at a time.    The  second bit is workflow which can control who needs to provide what and when.

Depending upon your requirement you could have a workflow that routes a document through a set of people or groups or something more complicated with users supplying their indicidual contributions to the overall document that get merged or combined to for some sort of compound document.