Per-section permissions

Per-section change management

Content managers can now allow a user to edit just one particular section of a document without making the whole document available to the user. This is a requirement for many large organizations, particularly organizations that require multiple entities to have input into documents while protecting each entity’s proprietary information.

Each document section can have its own version history and draft retention draft retention settings. Content managers can now trace a change to a large document down to the section from which the change occurred and to the user who made the change. Content managers can also revert a document section to a previous version while keeping other document sections at their current version. This isolates the amount of data loss when reverting a portion of a document back to a previous baseline.

Per-section workflows

Per-section information management policies

Content managers can now subject each section of a large document to a workflow, such as approval or feedback, independently of the document’s other sections. Each document section can now have its own review team, and content review can now be focused to the section rather than to the document as a whole. This is a key enabler for making the development of large documents a manageable process.

Each document section can have its own information management policy that is independent of the complete document. For example, copy and distribution restrictions can now be applied to just the sensitive sections of a document, allowing an organization to share non-sensitive portions of a document while protecting the sensitive portions.

Per-section concurrency control

The docBlock leverages SharePoint’s existing check-in/check-out capabilities, and extends those capabilities down to the document section. Allowing SharePoint to maintain concurrency control while a team of users concurrently edits a document is critical to getting the completed document produced with zero data loss resulting from concurrency control breakdown.

The term “low bandwidth” usually refers to users who are connected to the Internet via a dial-up or cellular connection, and generally only takes into account the download speed of the connection. However if the user also needs to save data to a portal, such as when editing a document, the user’s upload speed needs to be taken into account. This is an issue for many users who are generally thought to have high bandwidth connections, because their connections are asymmetric. I.e. while the user may have an 8 Mbps download rate, the user may only have a 512 Kbps upload rate. This makes accessing or saving a large document very time consuming. By splitting a large physical document into a collection of document sections, a user who is only interested in a small section of a large document only needs to download or upload that small section, rather than the entire document. This can significantly help an organization reduce its WAN bandwidth demands without the need to procure any additional WAN optimization hardware or software.

Offline section editing

Support for offline document editing is a required scenario for most organizations, as most organizations now have at least some mobile workers. These mobile workers spend a portion of their time without a connection to organization networks or the Internet. The docBlock interoperates with most tools that allow users to take SharePoint data offline line, including Groove SharePoint workspaces and the Office Drafts folders.

Zero client deployment

The cost of deploying software to user desktops can block the adoption of new software by large enterprise customers. The docBlock does all of its work at the server level. No new client applications or application add-ins are required to leverage the virtual document capabilities. This is key to encouraging fast organizational SharePoint adoption and enabling external sharing scenarios where external users such as contractors, vendors, and partners need to participate in an organization’s virtual document development process.