Easiest/Fastest Way to Upload Document

[kylerobson]

I'm using Sharepoint Portal 2003 on a standard edition windows server 2003 install. The users will be using Windows Office 2003. I'm interested in finding the easiest and fastest way to upload documents to document libraries. Hitting "upload document" is not ideal. Neither is dragging and dropping (which I'm currently having errors with anyway). Adding the document library as a network place is especially bad, as it's so difficult to do. Basically I would love a way to open or make a file on the user's PC in word or excel, edit it, and save it to the document library from excel. I know this is hard or impossible, but if there is a way, I would love to know it, because the users I support have a fairly low level of technical skill, and we don't want them to be saving documents locally and thinking they're saving them on sharepoint, or not being able to figure out how to get them on sharepoint. Even if it's not possible to save straight from word or excel, I would still like to know the easiest way.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Kyle Robson

 

[ouzojd]

Definetly not as easy as it should be, but here is the available ways I know of. I would love to hear more from anyone else.

1. Ask users to create New Documents from the Document Library they intend to save to ( a bit tricky if the document library isn't all word or all excel) I think Mindsharp has something as a free download that lets users recover deleted items from a doc library and also choose what type of new file they are creating.

2. Copy/Cut and Paste into Explorer view as you mentioned above.

3. This way is nice but has a little problem but basically in Word or Excel etc when you click Save As, type the Portal URL into the filename box and press enter

http://portal

this will bring up the Portals taxonomy and you can browse the Doc Libraries in the Portal (not to Sites) problem is that if someone doesnt have any access to a particular subarea of the portal they wont be able to browse any of its immediate parents area.

Also the last way I mentioned in the Save As box once you have entered the Portal URL and pressed enter you can go to tools and select add to My Places which makes it a little button users can select on the left of the Open/Save boxes under My Documents, My Computer etc.

4. And of course map drives as you suggested above.

If they fixed that issue I described in No 3 I think that way would be the easiest for users.

 

[kylerobson]

Also it's important to be able to save an existing document to a document library. To me, hitting upload document seems best, but I don't think this will be intuitive for most users. Using that webpart from Mindsharp sounds good, but only for new documents.

 

[ouzojd]

There is also the topic assistant which can be trained but I never used it because we had a lot of stuff we really didnt need on our network drives and I thought it a good opportunity to make everyone clean up their stuff, get rid of files we dont need and archive really old stuff.

If you have lots to upload it might be worth looking at that but I cant be much help on how to do it sorry.