SharePoint makes it very easy for users to upload documents to a portal site and edit those documents in familiar desktop applications. As with many other systems, SharePoint uses the notion of check-out and check-in, also known as locking, to pre-empt and potential issues resulting from concurrency violations, i.e. two users overwriting each other’s edits to a document. While locking a document works well when only one person needs to edit the document, it does not work well when a team of people need to edit the document. In effect requiring a user to obtain a lock on a document forces all people who need to edit the document to do so in a serial fashion. I.e. User 1 locks the document. User 2 must wait until User 1 has finished edits and unlocked the document. Etc. This serial process makes it very difficult to shorten the calendar time it takes to complete a document by adding additional people to the team.

Serial Authoring:

Concurrent Authoring:

There have been several approaches to dealing with this serial authoring process. One database-style approach is to create an application in which each small piece of content that will intimately end up in the document is an object in the application. Authors use a special application interface to work with the document components. The document is then programmatically generated from the object repository in the authoring application. While this approach provides a high degree of parallelism it requires a great deal of training for the authors. It also makes it difficult for the authors to edit the document in a way that is not directly supported by the authoring application. The high training requirement and the lack of flexibility are the main barriers to adoption for this approach.

Another approach is to allow each author to edit an independent copy of the document and to merge their changes when they save the document. This is the approach that Word 2010 uses for its co-authoring feature. While this approach has the benefit of allowing the authors to retain their desktop document authoring tool (Word), because each author is working on a replica of the original document, the approach inherits a class of challenges typically seen with replication applications. The main issue is the high potential for conflicts. Because each contributor has access to the whole document, it becomes difficult to ensure that each contributor has only modified the portions of the document that he or she was supposed to and has not accidentally overwritten other contributor’s changes. For example, one author makes a change to a paragraph while another author completely deletes the paragraph. There is no automated fashion by which these types of conflicts can be resolved deterministically, so a person is required to resolve the conflicts manually. While this approach can work for small, well-coordinated teams, the approach does not scale well. The main drawback of this approach is that suffers from lack of governance required for repeatable, sustainable business processes.

The approach the docBlock Ascend uses for team-based document authoring is a hybrid between the two approaches previously discussed. When the docBlock Ascend is connected to a SharePoint farm, content managers are able to virtualize documents that need to be edited by a team. Virtual documents can be partitioned into multiple document parts. The content manager decides how much or how little content belongs in each document part. This approach to team-based document authoring does not have as high a degree of potential parallelism as the database-style approach but also does not have nearly as high of a training requirement, since all authors continue to use their current document editing applications, like Word. Because each document part contains a non-overlapping section of content from the virtual document, there is never the potential for edit or merge conflicts as in Word 2010’s co-authoring approach. Users not only retain full SharePoint document management and collaboration capabilities on the virtual document but also see these benefits extended down to the granularity of each document part. The docBlock Ascend’s virtual document task management capabilities allow content managers and project managers to gain visibility into task assignments and status through SharePoint task lists or Project 2010. The structure, governance, and granular security that the docBlock incorporates into its virtual document implementation allow team-based document authoring scenarios that scale from small workgroups to enterprise-sized teams.

Read more about advanced document management usage scenarios that docBlock Ascend virtual documents enables on the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 platforms:

Download the Enhancing SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents black paper (registration required). The black paper discusses several key document management usage scenarios enabled through docBlock Ascend's virtual document enhancements to the SharePoint platform.

Ready to bring the power of docBlock Ascend to your document management experience? Get pricing and a no-obligation quote today.

For more information on the docBlock Ascend, please download the docBlock Ascend product brochure or contact sales@blackbladeinc.com / +1-703-260-1111. See the docBlock Ascend in action by scheduling a live web demo, or attend a public webinar, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm EST.