RE: Hooking my own help file to Word template

["Steve Hudson" <steve -at- wright -dot- com -dot- au>]

First, if its on a network, the easy way is to provide a button that calls a
macro that has one line ActiveDocument.FollowHyperlink blah blah blah. You
then put it on an addressable location on the server such as
//server/doco/onlinehelp/template/default.html


Second, are you really sure you want to do the network thing? I have looked
at all the issues, some of which are below:


Where should I keep them?
There are two generic places to store templates. The first is on a server,
the second is on each local machine. There are a number of reasons for using
the local machine, discussed herein.

Server
Unless you have administration and easy physical access to a globally
available server, it can be almost impossible to update documents or
templates that are shared amongst a number of users. Word regularly leaves
open file locks on documents that are no longer in use. Whilst this does
improve Word's sluggish performance a little, it causes more problems than
what its worth.
Additionally, the key advantage of this approach is to keep all the
resources in a single place, and very rarely does an entire company have
such access to one server. You normally have to roll-out the template to a
number of servers, and this defeats the only advantage in using this method.
However, for smaller single-shops with a high-speed internal network, where
you can get the accesses to the server, this can help reduce your
maintenance. On a Windows NT-based server, Start > Settings > Control Panel
> Server > Shares is the way to boot users off your documents. Set up a
shortcut on your desktop on your server account to the Control Panel >
Server to make this easier.
Practically speaking though, users often have network speed problems, and
when this occurs all their documents will be incredibly slow to load if the
base template is stored across the network.
So, there are two good reasons to not use the server approach - speed and
ease of updates.

Locally
Obviously the two big advantages are speed and easy updates. However,
distribution of the templates can be a bit tricky.


I am building some simple localisation routines, just waiting on branding to
come back from the powers that be before rollout. Its as simple as reading
your local dir settings and doing a save as into there.

Steve Hudson
Principal Technical Writer
Wright Technologies (Aus)
steve -at- wright -dot- com -dot- au
(612) 9518-1822
The best way to predict the future... is to create it!


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