Co-authoring for professional services with CtrlShare

Professional services firms, especially in law, accounting and audit, lean hard on Microsoft Office for the advanced work: macro programming, importing data from outside sources, building intricate document layouts. That work happens in the Word and Excel desktop apps.

Many of those firms also run M‑Files to manage their documents. When two people need to write in the same file at once, they face a choice. Either copy the document by hand to somewhere co-authoring is enabled, or use M‑Files’ own co-authoring, which reaches the desktop apps only on M‑Files Cloud in selected editions and otherwise means Office for the web in a browser.

CtrlShare, an M‑Files add-on listed in the M‑Files Solution Catalog, is a third route. One click checks one or more documents out for co-authoring in OneDrive, and you manage who gets access. All Office desktop functions stay available, so people who know the desktop app keep working the way they always have. While the document is in OneDrive, it stays under control and cannot be shared with anyone who should not have it.

What CtrlShare does#

CtrlShare works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in OneDrive for Business. You can invite people outside the company to edit as well, and when the work is done the document goes back into M‑Files as a new version.

Why M‑Files checks a document out to one person#

M‑Files lets only one person edit a document at a time. That prevents the version muddle familiar from shared folders, and most of the time it is the right default. When a team has to write one document together, it gets in the way: the team needs a secure way to co-author that keeps everyone in the Office desktop apps.

See how CtrlShare handles that: one click out of the vault to OneDrive, and back in as a new version.

Office desktop and Office for the web are not the same#

Microsoft Office for the web gives a different experience from the desktop app, in Word and Excel particularly. According to the tech site Beebom, these are some of the features missing from the web version:

• Microsoft Word. You cannot add captions, citations or a bibliography, and you cannot merge, compare or combine documents. You cannot insert online videos or audio files.
• Microsoft Excel. You do not have access to advanced formula tools. You can view PivotCharts online but not create them. You cannot use data analysis tools such as Solver or the Data Analysis Toolpak.

The web version also does not support some file formats, among them .xlsb, .xlsm (Excel macro-enabled workbooks) and .xltm. Microsoft documents the differences for Word and Excel on its own support pages.

If your financial models are built with those formula and analysis tools, the browser is not where that workbook can be written.

The short version#

Co-authoring is part of the daily work in many professional services firms, and doing it securely is the hard part. CtrlShare for M‑Files lets a team work on Office documents together with access and editing permissions under control, in the desktop apps they already use rather than in a web environment.

See what happens when CtrlShare checks a document out, or get in touch and we will help set up an environment where you can try it. We answer the same working day.