Forum Discussion
Company Word templates available for anyone in the organization
Bonevoyage Have you tried to store your template in an Organisation assets library?
The templates will be available on the Office Clients (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/organization-assets-library
I had this scenario a few years ago and what we did to resolve this was to create a content type with the docx template in the Content Type Hub. We then made sure that it was added to all new sites and OneDrives. As we use PowerShell to create these, via BAU and new user onboarding, it's not often that we get sites created that don't have these.
We did this alongside a consistent message in our user adoption, which was "Start where you want to end up", an approach that meant the user created the initial word document wherever they wanted it to be saved. Thus, the board can compose papers in the secretariat site, finance in finance and so on. The save action recognises where the document was initialised and provides the appropriate folder / site in the backstage area. So I can confirm your findings, but for us, this was default behaviour but for us it was a positive thing.
We did have a need that was similar to your own, which was trying to make all SPO sites that a user was involved with visible to the desktop apps by default. Our solution a few years ago was to create a SharePoint page that when visited would auto-bookmark in Office365 a specifically set number of sites. We did this via JavaScript and the CSOM. As users started opening and accessing their material they built appropriate links within the Desktop apps and started using them.
We did look at default save locations but I can't recall offhand what we did. I'll check my project literature tomorrow and will come back with this point and anything else that may be of use for you.
Thanks for the answer Steven,
I'm afraid I've to come with some cunning solution to push company templates to all users. SharePoint is unfortunately not the way to go at this time, eventhough it is globally available to all our users and easily accessible from any place on this globe.
Bonevoyage Hi, would you mind sharing how you managed to do this. Am am creating a number of Outlook templates, for out globally dispersed team, (IT, sales, finance, marketing, etc) and want everyone in their respective teams to be able to use the standard templates. At the moment I'm struggling to get this to work! I also want to control the templates - format, colours, etc so the only thing the guys would do would be to add the relevant information into each email. Thank-you so much.
Understandable! I ended up having to modify the default.dotm for the entire organisation today in a very similar request. Glad to hear you solved your issue though.