Template issues in a global organisation

Good morning everyone,
The company I currently contract to operates worldwide and stores their
templates on a Sharepoint site. (imo - not a good idea). To access a
template, one navigates to the template area on our Sharepoint site and
clicks on the required template. This action does not, however, open a new
version of the document, but a read only version of the actual template
(complete with .dot extension). It is then necessary to save the document
which is done to a local server (local in the sense that it is in our
building and used mostly by this group). Because the saved document has no
inherent template it naturally enough adopts 'normal.dot'. We now have all
the reports, specifications documents based on normal.dot instead of the
'correct' template. I might add that the local normal.dot template has been
around for a long time and is far removed from the original default version.
I need to submit a convincing arguement in order to get this practice
changed and would like to know what potential problems can arise from using
this generic template.
Because of the difficulty of getting reliable information at this level of
complexity it is hard to know what is factual and what is urban legend - I
would therefore appreciate some help.
Thanks in advance

Take a look at some of the information on fellow MVP Shauna Kelly's website
at http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/index.html

--
Hope this helps,

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Please reply only to the newsgroups unless you wish to obtain my services on
a paid professional basis.

"alltechedout" wrote in message
...
Good morning everyone,
The company I currently contract to operates worldwide and stores their
templates on a Sharepoint site. (imo - not a good idea). To access a
template, one navigates to the template area on our Sharepoint site and
clicks on the required template. This action does not, however, open a new
version of the document, but a read only version of the actual template
(complete with .dot extension). It is then necessary to save the document
which is done to a local server (local in the sense that it is in our
building and used mostly by this group). Because the saved document has no
inherent template it naturally enough adopts 'normal.dot'. We now have all
the reports, specifications documents based on normal.dot instead of the
'correct' template. I might add that the local normal.dot template has
been
around for a long time and is far removed from the original default
version.
I need to submit a convincing arguement in order to get this practice
changed and would like to know what potential problems can arise from
using
this generic template.
Because of the difficulty of getting reliable information at this level of
complexity it is hard to know what is factual and what is urban legend - I
would therefore appreciate some help.
Thanks in advance