How SharePoint Assists Publishing in Office 2003
Document workspaces are a special kind of WSS team site designed primarily to support the updating and republishing of documents that exist in a standard document library. In document workspaces, multiple authors can work on local copies of documents. Each author's local copy is then merged back into a master copy before republishing. This support is built only into Office 2003 applications.
You don't need to use a document workspace to update a document, but the document workspace supports the updating process, especially if you want multiple people to provide updates and data, such as links, tasks, and events that assist the updating process. You can provision a document workspace from the browser or an Office 2003 application. A copy of the document to be worked on is placed in the workspace, and the document remembers its source location so that it's published back to that location. In addition, the location of the document workspace is recorded in the document's header so that offline and local edits can be made and subsequently merged back to the master copy in the document workspace. . . .
