Working with Shared Office Documents

With Jive for Office, you can share your Office documents with others in your online community. As you make changes to a shared document on your computer, Jive for Office synchronizes the document with the version that's visible in the community, and provides real-time notifications to users working in the same document. The notifications tell users that content has changed, plus give them the option to incorporate the changes into their version using a merge tool. This keeps the content on the community up to date, but also synchronizes comments, tags, and collaboration settings between the community and your document.

This feature is supported for Microsoft Office versions 2003, 2007 and 2010 running on Windows.

Note: If you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit everything but the content of a shared document in the community. In the community you can edit descriptions, tags, and categories, and you can use an Office program to edit the document content.

What You Can Do

With Jive for Office, you can upload Microsoft Office documents to your community, then keep changes to the document in sync while you work in Office.

In particular, with Jive for Office you can:

Upload Office documents to your community without leaving Microsoft Office. When you upload a document, the community displays a preview of the document (although it must still be edited using Microsoft Office).
Use Jive in the Office toolbar ribbon to:
- Change collaboration options to indicate who can edit the document in the community.
- Create a document for your community.
- View the currently published version of your local document in your community.
- Share your document with others.
- Check for updates to the document.
Use the Dashboard to:
- See who else is editing the document.
- See how many people viewed the document, who created it, and who’s contributed to it.
- View, add, delete, and reply to comments.
- View and add tags to help categorize the document in the community.
- Edit the document's description.
- View older versions of the document.
- Rate the document, and see how others rate it.
- Browse files similar to the open file.
- Take a look at more files created by the author.
- Rate the document, and see how others have rated it.

Get set up

You'll need the Jive for Office add-in to share documents between Office applications and your community, which requires Microsoft Windows. If you don't have the add-in, you can get it when you're viewing an uploaded Office document in the community.

To get the Jive for Office add-in:

In your community, navigate to—or upload—an Office document.
To the right of your document, click the Download Jive Connects for Microsoft Office link as shown in the following image.

Get connected to your community

After you first install Jive for Office, it might not be completely set up to connect to the community you want to synchronize documents with. To connect, you need to provide your user name and password.

To get connected to your community:

In the Jive menu, click Accounts.
Click Add to add your Jive account.
Enter the Community URL, which is the exact URL that you use to navigate and log in to your community.
Enter your Jive user name and password.
To begin adding documents to the community, see Add a document to the community.

Add a document to the community

To have an Office document appear in the community, you can either add it using Jive Connects for Microsoft Office or upload the document from inside the community.

To add a document using Jive Connects for Microsoft Office:

Connect to the community. For more on this, see Get connected to your community.
Open or create a document in Microsoft Office.
Click Jive > Publish New as shown in the following image.
Note: Once the document lives in the community, clicking Publish Update uploads your changes to the community.
In the dialog box, navigate to the place in the community where you want to save the document.
Enter the name in the Document Name field at the bottom of the dialog box. You can also add tags to help other users find your document in the community; provide an optional description; and decide who can edit your document. You can even change the local file location for your document by editing the Store At path.
Note: You don’t need to save your document or changes to your document locally before publishing to Jive
Click Save.
To synchronize documents with the rest of the community, see Keep documents synchronized.

Attention: When you add an Excel spreadsheet to a community, Jive for Office adds a hidden spreadsheet that contains a copy of the original spreadsheet with additional metadata. This copy is used to track changes and allow collaborative working on the spreadsheet.

Once the document is added to the community, you can click Jive > Dashboard to display a panel of information about the document, such as comments, ratings, and the current version number. The following image shows the Dashboard.
Jive Connects Dashboard

To add a document from inside the community:

From your community, click New > Document.
Select Upload a File.
Select the location for your document.
Click Choose File.
Select the file from your desktop.
Click Publish. Depending on the size of your document, it might take a few seconds to upload it.

Create a new document from an existing one

To avoid a few steps, you can just upload an existing document and rename it as a new document to start fresh with in the community. This creates a new uploaded document in the community, leaving the previous uploaded document in the community as it was when you last synchronized. The new document will have the content of the previous one, but won't have its other properties, such as comments, collaboration settings, tags, and so on.

Note: Making a new document in this way leaves you with an Office document that has the same content, but without all of the community-related information. To get the previous Office document with that information, go to that document's page in your community and click the Download link beneath its preview.

To create a new document from an existing uploaded document:

In Office, open the document you want to start from.
Select Jive > Publish As.
In the dialog box, navigate to the place in the community where you want to save the document.
Enter the new name in the Document Name field at the bottom of the dialog box.
Click Publish.

Keep documents synchronized

After you've connected your community to Office, Jive Connects for Microsoft Office keeps your documents synchronized with the community. Jive for Office does the following:

Updates the document preview in the community when you save changes to the document's content.
Updates the Office document comments list with comments made in the community.
Lets you see updates from others in your community and review them before using them.
Keeps changes to community-related document properties in sync between the Office application and the community. When a change is made in one place, it shows up in the other. You can see the following properties in the Dashboard:
- Tags
- Categories
- The document's title
- The document's description
- Revision activity
- Document's state

To grab document updates from the community:

When your document has been updated by someone in the community, you get a real-time pop-up notification. You can also click Check for Updates if you're feeling impatient.
If there are no changes, a message tells you so. Otherwise, you can select how you want to deal with the changes:
- Replace my version to accept the newer version, overwriting your own local changes. (You can also Overwrite Local Version from the Jive toolbar at any time if you want to discard your local work and start over with the published version.)
- Merge and Review to review which changes you want to use.
- Ignore to continue working without accepting or rejecting changes at this time.
When you're done working, save your changes so others in the community can see your recent changes.
If at any time you want to overwrite the current local document with the version on the community, click Check for Updates > Overwrite local version in the Jive toolbar.

Work with document versions

As you work on a document in Office, Jive Connects for Microsoft Office keeps track of changes, including community-related information such as comments. It can sync your changes with what's going on in the community with the click of a button. You can even view the changes that have been made since previous versions of the document while in Office. You can also save a previous version as the current one.

Note: The version management feature does its work in part by using the change tracking feature built into Office. That means that if you download a document that someone has made changes to, you might see revision marks placed there by the change tracking feature. The document is fine, but the revision marks can make it hard to read. You can hide the marks in the following ways:

In Word 2007 or 2010, select the Review tab. In the Tracking group, select Final in the Display for Review drop-down menu to hide the changes.
In Word 2003, locate the Reviewing toolbar. In the Display for Review drop-down menu, select Final.

Work with document revisions

Jive Connects for Microsoft Office creates a new version of a document whenever you save changes to the document.

To view previous versions of a document:

Open a community document. You'll see the dashboard on the right. (If you don’t, select Jive in the toolbar and click the Dashboard button.)
Under Versions, if the version you want to see isn't visible, scroll down to display it. Previous versions will be listed with the date/time when they were saved. If you mouse over a version, you'll see the name of the person who published that version.
From the list of versions, click the one you want to view.

Note: You can't save a previous version as the current one. To recover a previous version, open that version and publish it under a new name.

Work with document activity

Jive Connects for Microsoft Office displays a list of activity related to the document. This activity includes versions saved and comments added. By clicking certain items in the activity list, you can add information to it. For example, You can view and add comments from the Comments tab.

To view document activity:

In Office, click Jive and then click the Dashboard button.
In the Overview panel, you can see details about the document, such as when it was last edited and what version you're looking at.
Click the arrows next to tags, categories or description to add or edit this information and have it show up in the community.
Click the Comments tab and then Reply to add a comment to the open document. These comments show up in the community as comments. For more on this see Add a comment
You can also browse other documents that the author has created or documents similar to the open document.

Add a comment

When you comment on a document in Office or the community (as opposed to adding inline comments in the body of a document), your comments are synchronized and appear in both places. When you add inline comments in either location, these comments are visible where they are created, but are not synchronized or visible from the other location.

There are two kinds of comments for shared Office documents:

Document comments are like those people make elsewhere in the community. People can usually comment on shared documents just as they comment on other kinds of documents. These are added in the community or in Office. You can see these in Office when you go to Jive > Dashboard and then click the Comments tab.
Inline comments appear in the document itself. An inline comment is a way to add a comment to a particular part of the document. When you add an inline comment in the community, it shows up in the community on the Inline Comments tab at the bottom of the document, as well as in the document preview, but is not visible in Office. Inline comments you create in Office can be seen in the Review tab when you select Final Showing Markup in the Tracking group, but cannot be seen in the Jive community.

To add a document comment:

In Office, go to Jive > Dashboard and then click the Comments tab.
Type your comment.
Click Add.
You can also click Reply to reply to an existing comment, or Delete to delete an existing comment.

Add collaborators

By default, when you use for Office to add a document to your community, the document's collaboration options are set as follows:

Only you can edit the document when you save to your personal container.
Anyone can edit it when you save it to an open place.

You can change these defaults to fit the document needs.

To change collaboration options:

On the Jive toolbar, click the Collaboration button.
In the dialog box, select the option to set who can edit:
- Specific people—Only the people whose names you choose can make changes. If you select this, begin typing the person's name in the box beneath Specific people. When their full name appears, click it to add it to the list.
- Just you—Only you can make changes to the document's content.
- Anyone—Anyone in the community can make changes.
Click Update.