Did I ask you to edit my document?

If your company is anything like ours, lots of your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are being stored in various SharePoint document libraries.  And you probably have people who just can't resist taking a look and adding their feedback - after all that's one of the great features about storing your documents in SharePoint.  But sometimes don't you really wish people would just leave it alone until your finished?  And wouldn't it be nice if only a certain group of people (aka the nice people who always say "looks great!" to anything) were able to view your work?  Unfortunately with SharePoint out-of-the-box, any user that has the rights to view documents can also modify its contents.  Yikes!  So, outside of manually converting each document to PDF and then uploading it to a separate document library and THEN telling people to go there to view them, there aren't many options.  Unless of course you use Bamboo's Office to PDF Conversion which allows you to automatically schedule the conversion documents stored in a SharePoint document library to PDF and puts them in a nifty shadow library.

What exactly does that mean?

It means you can keep your precious original documents safe from prying eyes by creating and updating them in a SharePoint Document Library stored on a secure site and then automatically converting these documents to PDF.  Then they are put in a shadow Document Library on a separate, public site for people to look but not touch!  It even has this cool feature that allows you to configure so that only the most current version of a document is turned into a PDF -  in case you are working with multiple drafts.   

We've just released a new version, 1.3 that has several new features including:

• Support for Microsoft Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).
• Maintains a list of failed conversions
• Configuration file can be changed to handle larger and longer conversion jobs
• Supports 64-bit architecture

You can go here to read more details and download a new trial.  Keep those documents safe!