>I don't know a lot about SharePoint, so bear with me here...
>
>If I have a document that is already in SharePoint, should it allow me to open the file, make changes, and save it without checking out the file in the first place?

I *think* it's a setup issue - I've worked in Sharepoints that allowed what you see and another where things were tightly locked up.

Frankly, and probably because I've not yet come across anything discussing 'how to use Sharepoint', I've found the 'locked down' setup very cumbersome to work with. I've not seen any "check-out" mechanism. So I save a document to my local storage and use it there. If I had some suggested updates I just pass on the matter, not knowing who to contact about such updating.

Sharepoint is probably a very good thing. But ike much else in the IT world, it seems we're expected to figure things out by ourselves. To me, with something like Sharepoint, this is an impossible task.

cheers