www.johntimney.com

A colleague of mine with a lame excuse for not blogging ever "I dont have time to blog regularly enough, but I thought this would be an interesting topic!" asked me to post something for him.  Given its related to one of those specialised sharepoint in the field type questions I had little choice but to post it here.  All credit to Brian, I am just the lacky on this one!

My Scenario: Distributed multiple users updating a single spreadsheet.  This works fine with a file system, as we can use Excel workbook sharing

Problem: I am experiencing rare SharePoint Disgruntlement, at losing a really neat Excel collaboration feature (when working on a file system) by collaborating in MOSS.

This is the official explanation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888841

Its particularly disappointing given it would be a Google-beating collaboration feature!

Solutions:

In my view the traditional SharePoint approach, would be to import your Excel data into a SharePoint list and share it that way! Its a very valid option for some scenarios, but not this one.

Its only really valid if you dont have large numbers of rows and columns, dont need any particularly sophisticated processing, graphing, or Macros otherwise you will be importing and exporting all the time to/from your list.

And no, sadly Excel services doesnt come to the rescue as this MSDN list of Unsupported features in Excel services highlights http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms496823.aspx

The Real Requirement:

For me, Check-in/Check-out is actually about as sophisticated as the old mainframe Printer Flag resolution, where we used a physical paper flag to control who was printing to avoid mixing up pages. Its a crude control at best. I wonder, has this become the de-facto SharePoint solution because that is how Developers work with source code control?

If we all have permissions, e.g. are Site Collection Admins, who can check-in, check-out at will, take ownership of site collections if we wish, and can switch versioning off, then why cant we make Workbook sharing work like it does on a file share? You wouldnt think it was technologically that hard, Id welcome some education on this.

So, for future generations of SharePoint Im looking for the next level of collaborative flexibility. When appropriate, update control needs to be able to be applied with cell-level locking. Each client application can have its own definition of what constitutes a control-cell (my own, probably incorrect, term).

Im not asking for this feature just in Excel, but that would be a great start. Maybe I ought to get more involved in the next Beta programme?

Brian English

Footnote: Brian English is a Technology Strategy Consultant based in the North East of England