<p>We had a need for a <strong>document management solution</strong> and were hoping <code>SharePoint 2007</code> would satisfy our needs. We felt our needs were relatively simple. We needed to manage <strong>versioning</strong>, have <strong>searching capabilities</strong>, and having an <strong>approval workflow</strong>.</p>

<p><code>SharePoint</code> handled these three aspects great out of the box.</p>

<p>However, we also require that the footer on the Office 2007 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) documents reflect the document version, last person to modify, and last modification date. These things can be done with office automation, but we have yet to find a complete solution.</p>

<p>We first tried to do it on the checking-in and checked-in events and followed this path for a while, however, the complication we ran into was after we made the changes to the document we had to no way of preventing the save from updating the version number. This resulted in something similar to this:</p>

<p>Document checked-in – the document version should be v0.1 however it is v0.2 because we save the document after the footer is replaced. If we look in the document history we there are 2 separate versions v0.1 does not have the footer v0.2 has the footer but it says v0.1 as that is the version the document was when it was replaced.</p>

<p>This is an unacceptable solution for us as we want the process to be completely handled on the user side so they would have full control to revert back to a version where the footer would be incorrect and not contain the correct data. When we attempted to create a custom approval/check-in workflow we found that the same problem was present. The footer is necessary so that hard-copies can be traced back to their electronic counterpart.</p>

<p>Another solution that was proposed to us was to build plugins for office that would handle the replacement of the footer. This is inadequate for our needs as it requires a client side deployment of our plugins which is undesirable by our clients. What we are looking for is a clean solution to this problem.</p>

[{'answer_id': 60141, 'author': 'axk', 'author_id': 578, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/578', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Here is a <a href="http://www.sharepointblogs.com/johnwpowell/archive/2007/07/13/display-version-number-and-other-sharepoint-metadata-in-word-2003-documents.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">blog post</a> which seem to be exactly the solution of your problem.</p>\n\n<p>Basically they create a custom field in the document library and use event receivers to keep the current version of the document in this field.\nThe "trick" is that on the client side this custom field shows up as a property of the document the value of which you can easily embed into the document\'s contents.</p>\n\n<p>I\'m not sure why changing the field won\'t increase the version of the document, but I guess it is because you\'re only changing metadata, not the actual document. </p>\n\n<p>They do use a little VBA script which runs on the client side, but it doesn\'t require any client side deployment as it is downloaded with the document. However I\'m not sure if any security settings changes on the client side may be needed to allow the script to run.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 68646, 'author': 'Jason', 'author_id': 10639, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/10639', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Does this information need to be in the footer?  A lot of the information is available within the Office 2007 application.  If you click on the round button in the upper left, and select "Server", you can view the version history, a lot of the other properties are available by clicking the round button and opening the "Prepare" menu, and selecting Properties.</p>\n\n<p>If this information must be displayed in the document footer I would investigate creating a custom Information Management Policy.  <a href="http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tonstegeman/archive/2007/02/01/moss-custom-policies-part-1-creating-a-custom-information-management-policy.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This</a> may be a good place to start.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/59186', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1/']