One of the neat little tricks, i’ve taken on board more and more of late, is the power of Word and/or Excel personal templates.
It’s always been a frustration for me to dig around on some obscure shared drive, for the latest version of a specific document or spreadsheet template. That’s why I generally use templates for most of the work I do.
Now, one of the problems with this is that I have to "drag" around my template library constantly, so I figured why not just stored them in the Cloud.
SkyDrive to the rescue…
Now, that worked really, really well for documents that i just need to share on the odd occasion – but what if I really wanted to manage and control my templates…could SkyDrive be helpful there in the long run.
no..obviously not. Versioning and such is not available on SkyDrive.
Then i looked a bit further and played around with my Office 365 setup – and now we’re talking familiar territory for me – SharePoint without the hassles of setting up a server, on an internal network that I couldn’t even get to all the time.
What i needed was for my templates to be stored in a controlled environment, available 24/7, for multiple people.
Here’s the scenarios I wanted to deal with:
- Controlled access to all templates
- Publication of templates when approved
- Synchronisation of templates locally
Tools of the trade:
- Office 365 Team Site
- Basic document library (with versioning turned on)
- SkyDrive Pro 2013
- Office 2013
That’s it, easy management of Office templates with Office 365, SkyDrive Pro 2013 and Office 2013.