If you’re saving a document directly from an Office application to SharePoint, you will get the nice option to save it to “My SharePoint Sites”. Apart from some confusion on how these links are created and especially when they are synchronized with the client there are some other behaviors that keep my client from using them.
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The first behavior is the error message that is shown when you are saving a document which has required fields. The user gets prompted with a big scary red cross, like he is doing something wrong or his document just went up in smoke. And that is while the user has not done anything wrong yet, he or she didn’t even got the change to enter the required fields yet..
We would like to alter this message and especially replace the red cross to make it a bit more friendly to the user. Has anyone have any experience doing this?
Second behavior is that when you close a document, you’ll get the message “Do you want to save this document?”. Nice, but if you are saving it directly to SharePoint you’ll never get the change to enter the metadata, after saving the Office application will close right away. One positive thing, this is not the case if you have any required fields. Of course, this is more by design; the user asked to close the document so that is just what it is going to do.
But I remember in SharePoint 2003 (check the screenshots), you were always prompted with a dialog, even when the library did not have any required fields. In my opinion this dialog was for more effective than the Document Information Panel, since you really had to submit it before continuing:
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Does anyone had any good results in altering this experience. In the end we want to gather as much metadata as possible, and that’s what SharePoint is about right?
koning53