I have recently started working at a company with around 700 workers in approximately 20 departments. The large majority of workers have Windows 98 and Office 97. (A small number use Windows 2000 and/or Office 2000). There seems to me to be a big mess in terms of templates and I was wondering the best way to make some order.
Here is the scenario:
In File Locations in Word, in User Templates, there is a directory. For most people it is a directory on a network share. Some departments have all users pointing to the same directory (i.e. \server\sales emplates) , others have each user pointing their own directory in the subfolder of templates (i.e. \server\marketing\david emplates). Some users have the User Templates directory pointing to a folder on their local computer – either the default directory that Word chooses or a specific local directory (i.e. c: emplates).
Under Workgroup Templates, for most users the field is blank, for others it is the same directory as User Templates.
The Startup field is default for most users, except for some users who use an application that determines the Startup directory for Word.
While many users have additional templates that they create documents from, almost all of the macros, toolbars, autotext, etc is stored in the normal.dot template (which is found in the directory listed under User Templates).
None of the normal.dot templates that sit on the server (and certainly none that are on the local machines) are defined as read-only – either by file security or by the read-only attribute.
I am not a big expert on templates or file locations, but this seems rather disorganized.
Can anyone recommend the best way to go about organizing the various departments and their users in terms of templates and file locations?