My first question was going to follow the poster above, and you answered it for me. I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?
Aside from that — what about MS cloud services? I mean, maybe that's not appropriate for healthcare or certain businesses, but for others it allows there to be a single source of truth if the workflow is correctly tuned, no? I can produce a doc in my local instace, push to 365, edit remotely on the web, have somebody else edit remotely, and sync it back to my local instance without a hitch.
I use Office365 for that purpose regularly at my job. I'm a developer, but I have regular communication with editors, producers, project managers, division managers, operations managers, art directors, and so on. A lot of the information we share is tabled and needs to stay updated, and editable by each party involved. It's worked well for me in that regard.
"I didn't realize Excel couldn't write back to the database. It shouldn't be too hard to develop an extension for that purpose, would it?"
Well, more accurately, it can write back to the database, but normal usage of Excel won't afford that result. Normal usage of Excel you have an independent value.
It is also a dubious proposition as to whether we want people to actually write back to the central database; you'd be one stray macro away from disaster. You sorta want it if someone manually corrects something, but not if they operate on it programmatically, and now we're making things really complicated.
Aside from that — what about MS cloud services? I mean, maybe that's not appropriate for healthcare or certain businesses, but for others it allows there to be a single source of truth if the workflow is correctly tuned, no? I can produce a doc in my local instace, push to 365, edit remotely on the web, have somebody else edit remotely, and sync it back to my local instance without a hitch.
I use Office365 for that purpose regularly at my job. I'm a developer, but I have regular communication with editors, producers, project managers, division managers, operations managers, art directors, and so on. A lot of the information we share is tabled and needs to stay updated, and editable by each party involved. It's worked well for me in that regard.
Maybe others have had different experiences?