We have hundreds of Word documents that we use for forms, meaning there are certain fields users can fill out but they can't otherwise modify the form. For us, it's acceptable for the users to store the filled out forms on their own computer or network drive, but we don't want them to save them back to the SharePoint library; we don't want them to be able to modify the form itself and we don't want them saving any of their data in the form in SharePoint.
We keep going around and around with this. SharePoint views the forms as 'documents', not forms, so it's hard to keep people from being able to modify the documents. We can and do protect the document so people can only fill out the fields, but we haven't been able to work out the issues with SharePoint, which, depending on the security we apply, either locks the document up so the fields can't be filled out, or it requires a checkout, or it requires permissions that allow the form to be saved back into SharePoint. I feel like a pinball getting batted into one obstacle after another.
Our closest attempt is to save the Word dos as .Dotm templates, assign them to content types, assign the content types to a document library. This does some things right, and some things wrong. What it does is use the form as a template, so the user needs to 'Create a new document' (Not upload a document) and Word will use the form as a template. This is almost what we want. The users can fill out the form. They can save it to their own desktop if they want. They can print the form.
Unfortunately, they can also save the form back into the SharePoint document library, which we don't want. I have considered using a workflow to delete any documents that are saved, but that seems kind of hokey. The other problem with this approach is the user experience. The user needs to click 'Create Document' and that brings up a long drop-down list of forms for them to select from. There is no sorting, no filtering, and no organization of this list. For a short list this is not a big problem, but we're have hundreds.
So my latest crazy thought is, what if we could click on something that caused the client to open Word using the command line options and tell it which form to use as a template? In other words, is there some way to invoke something like this?
- winword.exe /t <path>\<filename>.dotm