Reviewing drafts with linked files - best practice?

[wlbbox_2002]

I'm working with our first site that we've enabled Contribute editing with. My
role is to get Contribute installed and functional for the users and help them
learn to use it. I'm co-Administering the site also.

The other Administrator has chosen to set up her users as writers, and then
have them send her drafts for review, and then publish them. A solid, workable
method.

Today, one of her writers edited a page that contained a handful of links to
Microsoft documents (.ppt, .xls, etc.). Some of the links were updated
versions of existing docs, some were new docs and links. All new versions of
the docs were on the writers' local machine - so it took a combination of
editing links and adding new links to get the desired results. So far, so good
- this follows a logical flow.

But, when the writer sent the edited .htm page to the Administrator for review
/ publish, that's when the logical flow was interrupted. Not having
encountered this scenario before, the Administrator's first thought was to
preview the .htm page and then follow the links to the Microsoft docs. As you
can imagine, the links to the new docs were broken and the links to the
existing docs all brought up the old versions. The new versions of all these
files were still sitting on the writers' PC - as far as I can tell (please
correct me if you think otherwise).

The drafts console did have links to all of the new docs. So it seems like
the correct procedure is to individually review each of the Microsoft documents
first and publish them, and then review and publish the updated .htm file.

But I couldn't really find any good information on how to work with this
scenario. I did see a handful of posts in this forum that asked about similar
issues associated with images - but not really any with Microsoft documents and
none of them seemed to have good answers to the issue.

Have any of you run into this issue? Do you have a best practice on dealing
with it? Or is there some documentation / white paper / help that I haven't
yet found that lays it out more clearly?

Thanks for any help..
BTW, we're using Contribute version 3.

[cmitchell]

This is an interesting question. I know that when html files are sent
for approval, Contribute creates a temporary file in a temporary folder
that the approver can view via the link that is sent. After the page is
approved and published, that temporary draft is uploaded to it's
permanent position and all temp files are deleted from the server.

If I understand you correctly, the basic question is "Does Contribute
also create temporary versions of linked documents in the same way that
it publishes html pages as temp files for approval." Apparently the
answer is no since the links to these docs are broken when the approver
tries to view them.

I don't know what the best practice would be for this but I am going to
test this out on Monday when I get to work and if I find anything
interesting, I'll post it here. We are likely to run into this same
situation on our intranet.

We do use a staging server in our company that is sync'd to production
4x a day via a cron job, but that would not really help since what is
needed is for the linked docs to be temp files ready for review, not
production ready files ready for publishing. I'll let you know what I
find.

Christine