Forum Discussion
Company Word templates available for anyone in the organization
Hello,
Situation explained:
A lot of companies use custom Word templates to facilitate their company branding and and create a uniform layout for their Word documents. These Word template files usualy reside on a normal ReadOnly file share, and are accessible for all users in the company.
Now, with Covid-19, most users are working from home, and the normal fileshare is not available. The Word templates cannot be used. So, a clever solution is needed. SharePoint template might be the answer.
I tried, if it is possible to publish a set of Word templates in SharePoint, company wide. This seems a hard nut to crack, and not much information seems to be available with best practices how to solve this challenge.
What is the limitation I faced so far
Publishing company Word templates on a SharePoint Site is possible when storing the company template Word file as *.docx into the SharePoint TeamSite. Depending on the setting chosen, Word Online or local Word opens this template file in the correct company layout. So far, so good.
When it comes to saving this file, the default behaviour is that MS Word (Online or Local) wants to save the new document to the same SharePoint TeamSite it was opened from.
This behaviour is not desirable when working with company templates. The default save location should point to the users OneDrive folder, or the TeamSharePoint location the user belongs to. MS-Word should never take the decision to store the file in the same location as the company Word templates. This behaviour can result in a cluttering of documents from multiple teams.
A document created by a board member, should never be stored in the same location as a document created by a member of the company kitchen
Idealy Word (Online or Local) should ask the user where to store this new document, and suggesting OneDrive as the default location.
My question:
Has anyone a cunning plan to crack this nut?
All suggestions are welcome. Thanks for your help.
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
18 Replies
- Great thing with organization assets library, but company spesific templates where we have memos, invoices, meeting invites and so on. How can we govern corporate templates at a high level. Is there integration with document API to create text tags, extract master data from AAD etc?
There is little to no information regarding this around without extreme overpriced 3rd party solutions.
Help me out 🙂
Thanks,
Øyvind 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
Martin-Coupal your solution works great in the desktop app. But.... templates still won't show in Word online. This is really annoying since a lot of people in my organization open a new word document directly from their Teams or Sharepoint so it saves directly to the right directory. Do you have any idea if Microsoft has a solution for this?
Martin-Coupal thanks for sharing the info regarding the organization assets library! Just tried with my Microsoft 365 Business Standard license and that also works as expected. Great feature!
- Sorry, forgot to mention that I think you need E3 or E5 licence....
I can confirm that this works with any license that includes Office applications. I have distributed our templates to Business Standard licensed users. It is in fact part of your SharePoint Online subscription so no additional costs. They can access the templates from Office Dekstop and Office online inclusing Mobile apps.
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.
