Collaboration in SharePoint, it doesn’t mean you can edit my document

Collaboration is a word that is often used to describe the core capabilities of SharePoint.  It makes documents readily available to all employees working on a project and prevents multiple people from simultaneously making changes to them.

However, just because we are collaborating on a project, doesn’t mean I want to allow anyone working on the project to make changes to my documents. One way to prevent this is to maintain a parallel library of PDF versions of source documents.

These can be made available to anyone that needs to access the information but is not (or should not be) involved in updating this information. This process can be automated using PDF for SharePoint document transformation workflows.

A “Convert to PDF” workflow can be configured to automatically convert documents to PDF and deposit them into a separate document library whenever a new document is added to the source library and/or whenever a document is updated.  This will automatically maintain a library of secure, non-editable versions of your source documents for collaboration.