Sharepoint 2013 : Office 2013 and an Overview of Integration (part 5) - Live Co-Authoring,Document Information Panel

3.3 Live Co-Authoring

Prior to Office 2010, any user wanting to edit a document checked out by another user in SharePoint had to wait until the other user checked the document back in. This situation did not present a big issue in small groups, but when many users collaborated and worked on a large document, checkout on a central document prevented efficient progress.

With the integration of SharePoint, users of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote may now co-author a document in real time. The following steps demonstrate live co-authoring in action, using Office 2013:

1. Have User 1 open a PowerPoint 2013 document from a SharePoint document library, and ensure that this user opens the document in Edit mode.
2. Have User 2 open the same document from SharePoint, also in Edit mode (on a different computer).
3. Look to the bottom bar of PowerPoint 2013 and you should see a notification, like that in Figure 14, that multiple users are editing the document. You may click this notification to see the users editing the document.

   

   Figure 14. Multiple users editing a document

Office 2013 supports co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Word and PowerPoint support formal co-authoring, meaning that the application buffers changes until the user saves the changes. Conversely, Excel and OneNote support semiformal co-authoring, meaning anyone can make changes in real time.

3.4 Document Information Panel

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2013 display metadata of documents sourced from SharePoint via the Document Information Panel. To view the Document Information Panel in Word 2013, complete the following steps:

• 1.  Click the File tab to enter the backstage area.
• 2.  Ensure that the Info tab in the left navigation tabs is selected.
• 3.  Click the Properties drop-down on the far right of the page (Figure 15).

• 4.  Word will show the Document Information Panel (Figure 16).

SharePoint maintains default settings, per document library, for the Document Information Panel for documents of given content types contained in the document library. The following steps demonstrate accessing these settings and changes administrators may apply:

• 1.  Open the document library to the default view.
• 2.  Click the Library tab from the ribbon.
• 3.  Click the Library Settings icon from the ribbon.
• 4.  Click the Advanced Settings link.
• 5.  Ensure that the library allows management of content types.
• 6.  Navigate back to the Settings page for the library.
• 7.  Click the name of the content type that classifies documents where you wish to make Document Information Panel Settings changes.
• 8.  Click the Document Information Panel Settings link.
• 9.  SharePoint shows a page like that in Figure 17.

• 10.  The Template section allows you to provide a default document template to use; for example, you may have a proposal document template from which you start all new proposals.
• 11.  Check the check box in the Show Always section to ensure that the Document Information Panel displays whenever a user opens a document of this content type in the Office application.