Must I have share in order to use Sharepoint protocol plugin

[imdea]

I want to allow my users edit online capabilities mostly for MS Office documents. This is, they could map a network drive and access the repository, then edit a file online and not having to lock it first, create a working copy, download that working copy to the desktop, edit and then upload it again and finally unlock it. They use a mix of MS Office 2007 and 2010.

As far as I understand, this is possible with Sharepoint protocol, right? but, in order to use sharepoint protocol plugin, must I have to use Share? I mean, in my case we don't use share at all, we just want to allow that kind of function to the users, but I'm unsure if Sharepoint protocol would work for me?

Thanks.

[afaust]

Hello Imdea,

the Sharepoint protocol support is tied in with the Site structure the Share client uses to provide collaboration spaces. Technically, you would not need Share for Sharepoint, as the module is only a plugin for the Repository tier, but without Share, your users have no UI actions available to actually use the Sharepoint protocol.
The least you need to have is some sites (or even just one) that contains your users content. Without using the Share client, users would still be able to navigate to content and open it via Sharepoint from within the Office products, although this may be a bit unwieldly.

Sharepoint has nothing to do with mapping a network drive - there you might be confusing some aspects of CIFS / WebDAV and the Sharepoint protocol. CIFS allows any application to work with content in Alfresco and users are able to perform checkout / checkin via special actions - you might even provide a simple lock/unlock action pair. Please be aware that not even Sharepoint guarantees that users don't have lock documents before editing - it depends on the combination of Windows and Office wether this is done transparently. In your case of Office 2007 / 2010 clients, you should be on the good side of things, but users of older clients (2003 on XP) do have to beware.

Regards
Axel