Shortcut to checkout Sharepoint documents?

Question

I find myself in a lot of situations where I need to download the latest version of a document from sharepoint, or checkout a sharepoint document, make a small change, and then check the document back in. I find the website interface to be quite clunky for stuff like this, largely because I use firefox (bad with sharepoint) and keyboard launchers (instead of mousing around.)

Is there anyway to make a shortcut I can just run to checkout a specific sharepoint document without going through the web browser? Am I better off using Colligo Contributor or similar software to accomplish this? Can anyone recommend any software Sharepoint clients?

Answer 1

Microsoft Word 2003 and higher.

The whole Microsoft Office 2003+ suite is especially built to handle SharePoint documents. Opening the files directly from the Library and Saving them will automatically activate the versioning.

You can map a drive to the SharePoint library your accessing and work with the files as you would normally, and SharePoint will handle the versioning in the background. In SharePoint there is a menu option to open the library in Explorer which will give you the path to map.

There is no clients for SharePoint with regards to versioning as it is actually a very small part of SharePoint's feature set.

Answer 2

To find the folder your sharepoint files are in, open your sharepoint site with Internet Explorer. Click Actions, Open with Windows Explorer.

Answer 3

As the others have said - you can either open the doc library in Explorer (this will also add the location to your list of network locations) or map a drive and use the features built into newer versions of Office.

Another option is a 3rd party app from Colligo. They have a number of offline solutions for SharePoint - I think only the "Reader" is free though.