How to co-author Word documents?

Question

I am trying to understand how to edit Word documents concurrently with other users in my team at work.

Currently if someone open the document for editing, then the others can only open it in read only mode.

I tried to search Google about this issue and got confused.

Some of the results mention SkyDrive as a must have to be able to use this functionality. As far as I understand, SkyDrive is Microsoft server to share documents through the web. This is not necessary since the people I need to share my documents work in the next room in the same office.

In other results they say that you need Sharepoint to allow this functionality, others have said that it's build-in behavior of Word 2010.

So which of these is the truth?

Another thing that I need to figure out is how online synchronization can be achieved?

Can I get the latest changes from my colleagues whenever I press save to save my changes?

Answer 1

If you don't care about integrity of your data, and locking for changes, then you can do it with Skydrive or Dropbox.

On the other hand, if you actually want to do it properly, then you'll have to use something like Sharepoint, or Google Docs - which actually have decent multi-user editing capabilities. Microsoft are now doing some kind of hosted sharepoint type SaaS thing, I think it's Office365 or something.