File Conflicts: Can Groove track Changes WITHIN Excel Docs?

[ECB]

Hi all,
I am piloting the use of Groove 2007 across multiple offices globally.
Looking for a truly concurrent excel editing capability, which may be out of
reach with this product but we want to get as close as we can.

One idea was making the spreadsheet a shared spreadsheet provides great
functionality for tracking changes, made by cell by person, by date and so
on, however the file sharing across worldwide servers is prohibitively slow.

Another idea was to use Groove which has great peripheral services like
discussions and to-do's that can be associated with a workspace where we keep
the collaborative files.

The drawback is that a concurrent edit to the groove file spawns a copy in
the second saver's name, forcing we humans to reconcile what has changed
between the original and the conflict copy.

I have looked through the Groove 2007 user guide, and MS Knowledge bases and
blogs to find the same answer: "Groove saves a conflict copy in the name of
the conflictee" and "there is something that works for MS Word documents".

Is there any solution you have found or recommend to achieve an in file
conflict log or even better, a resolution to conflict similar to the native
excel tracking capabilities?

Even if this is as straightfoward as tricking the Groove version of the
excel to THINK it was shared via the normal means just to achieve the
tracking changes highlights, I would consider this a victory.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.

ECB

 

[Gregg Johnston [MSFT]]

Hi ECB,

So the functionality you are looking for essentially a co-editing feature?
Where two or more editors on a spreadsheet work con-currently? That feature
is not in Groove 2007, but you may want to look at SharePoint 2010 and
SharePoint Workspace 2010 for these features.

Gregg