problem sharing documents

[The Little One]

My church has a small office, where they have 3 computers networked
together. All the computers are running Windows XP and all have Office 2000
installed. They produce a lot of their documents, such as service sheets
and newsletters in Publisher.

They are having the following problem:

One person will start a publication and save it on the shared drive. For
whatever reason, they have to move to desks and on the second machine, try
to open the same publication to continue working. However even though they
have closed both the file and Publisher on the first machine, they get a
message that the file is in use and cannot be opened.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this and what things I
should try in order to resolve the issue? They've told me it is specific to
Publisher files.

Thanks.

 

[The Little One]

Unfortunately, that's going to be a problem. I can see the computer users
ending up with multiple copies of the file, all with different edits and
they'll end up printing the wrong one out. They're not the most able of
computer users. They have to have things simple.

There's no fix? Do all versions of Publisher have problems with networks?

 

[Mary Sauer]

It is the only way. Publisher is not network friendly. Save on the local hard drive,
copy to the network.