Policy Enforcment vs. Jawboning for Documents
One approach to “policies for working with Word” is rely on goodwill (or gentle arm-twisting – see Jawboning). Another approach, less common, is build-in compliance to the authoring/editing process. My feeling is that once you have more than one or two people opening and editing documents compliance enforcement should be built-in and jawboning is unlikely to work.
Enforcement sounds draconian, but heck – a lot of people pay taxes because they’re afraid of being audited. A lot of people use crazy styles, local formatting, and commit other cardinal sins because (1) it’s easier than following policies and (2) there is no enforcement mechanism.
Full disclosure: next week we will launch a Word add-in called Author Max™ that does compliance enforcement. I will post the URL as soon as it’s up and am looking forward to comments.
Katriel
