Opening a Word Template from SharePoint (2003/SP3)

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My company wants the library of templates I’ve developed to be stored in SharePoint for version protection. But from SharePoint the only way I can see to open the templates is as a .dot (I currently use an AutoOpen macro to open a userform). But I don’t want the user to overwrite the template, and I don’t know a way to force the user to save as a .doc. How do I get the templates to open as a .doc from SharePoint?

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The problem would be that the new document would be attached to a template on SharePoint, which Word can’t access.
One workaround is to save the template as a .doc and store that on SharePoint.

Perhaps Using Custom Word 2003 Templates with Document Libraries helps, but that is way beyond my comfort zone.

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Thanks, Hans. The Microsoft article is beyond my ability to understand and my authorization to implement it even I could understand it. I don’t see how using a .doc instead of a .dot solves the problem because the .doc would also be in danger of being overwritten. What I desire is for SharePoint to maintain my template, and when a user opens it, he gets a .doc separate from the template but based on it, as in Word.

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Another option, that I have not tested would be to use Webdav access to the SharePoint, so that it appears to be a file share to Word. I have used this to access documents with no problems so I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work with a template.

StuartR

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Thanks, Stuart for the tip about WebDav. I’ll talk to my systems people and see if we can implement it.

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