To recap, when last we met, I had run into the SharePoint equivalent of a brick wall while attempting to create a Document Workspace from within a Word doc, and found myself staring at a "contact your site administrator" message. Here at Bamboo, that would be Brett, and since I strive to avoid pestering him with my Tales from the End User Crypt except when absolutely necessary, I tried everything I could think of in an attempt to avoid having to do so.
Those attempts included changing the name of the file, trying several different URLs (and versions of URLs, including versions with and without the .aspx suffix, versions representing lists, versions representing libraries, etc.) only to have them all result in the same frustrating error message. With those attempts having failed, I turned my attentions to Google and, to paraphrase the title of a song that I saw Elvis Costello cover in concert last night, "The Google Let Me Down."
As a result, this morning found me knocking on Brett's office door and pleading for deliverance. As I walked Brett through what I was trying to do, he was able to successfully create a Document Workspace from Word while logged in as himself. Well, of course, he was able to, right? Brett went on to verify that my permissions were indeed set to Full Control, and further verified my understanding that such a permission level should be more than sufficient to permit me to create a Document Workspace from Word.
Brett then asked if I was able to create a Document Workspace from within SharePoint proper, and I said that I was, since I'd done so for the sake of a previous blog entry some time ago. Since I've been known to muck about with my permissions (also for the sake of blog entries) though, I figured I'd best verify that I was still able to do so, figuring that if I couldn't, that might help Brett diagnose the source of the problem. Well, as I got back to my desk, I figured I'd try one more time to create a Document Workspace directly from a Word doc, using a URL I'm near certain that I'd tried previously (our department's home page within the portal, without the trailing default.aspx), since Brett had successfully created his own Workspace from a Word doc within his own department's version of the same page.
Would you believe that the Document Workspace was successfully created this time? Brett swears that he didn't do anything, but I choose to believe that, perhaps employing the flourish of a seasoned stage magician, he waved his magic wand over the server after I left his office, and that's why it worked. Regardless of his methods, or any mystical arts which may have been employed in the process, one certainly can't argue with the results. Those results, upon my successful creation of a Document Workspace from Word, manifested themselves in my Document Management pane in Word switching over to this appearance:
Just as you would expect, clicking the Open site in browser link (as seen near the top of the image above) renders the associated Document Workspace, as created in the SharePoint environment:
Now that I've made it past the unexpected hurdle that the act of creation presented, come Monday I'll take a closer look at the nature of the integration between Word and the SharePoint Document Workspace, and what features are enabled within the Document Management pane in Word.
Read the entire Creating a Document Workspace via Word 2007 series:
Posted
Jun 12 2009, 02:11 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.