Can Sharepoint enable multiple users to access and edit a document at the same time?

Question

_{Tuesday, April 20, 2010 9:23 AM}

Hi,

My Company currently uses (to a small extent) a early version of sharepoint. However we would like to use sharepoint software more to help streamline some of our work processes and centralise some documents.

One of the questions we have is that we are looking to upload a Excel spreadsheet to sharepoint that requies access by all office staff. Currently with Excel with a shared document, only 1 person can have control to prevent multiple changes occuring and being overwritten in error.

Does sharepoint allow an uploaded document to be viewed and edited by more than one user at the same time. The document is a hotel booking schedule and as we have a team of reservation consultants it makes sense that they can all access and save data at the same time rather than having to email 1 person to update the spreadsheet with each new booking.

If Sharepoint can't do this does anyone have any other solutions?

All replies (2)

_{Tuesday, April 20, 2010 1:19 PM | 1 vote}

Viewed - Yes, Edited - No.  The inability of multiple users to edit a document at the same time is a limitation of Word and Excel, not SharePoint.  When Word saves a file it has no ability to merge changes with an existing file in storage.  That's the real problem.

There are some third party products that allow multiple users to edit different sections of a document at the same time.  For example, Black Blade Associates has a product called docBlock for SharePoint that makes this possible.  http://www.blackbladeinc.com/en-us/products/docBlock/Pages/default.aspx

Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP

_{Thursday, June 14, 2012 8:48 AM}

Try to use co-authoring.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718249.aspx

OvidiuG