>>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.
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>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

I share your opinion about Sharepoint education.

The systems guy here says that you shouldn't have to check a file out, but it is a best practice. I can't imagine why they would include that as an "optional" feature because all it takes is one person to not do it to mess everything up. IMO, it should be required, or not there at all.

Now, I am making an assumption that it IS required, but we have something wrong in our configuration. I'm think what is happening is that I open the file and save it, and it is saving directly to the drive (which would mean I have read-write access directly to the drive) instead of going through Sharepoint. I am just trying to justify my conclusion.