Many years ago there was a common pattern for Office Workers.  Essentially before the true abundance of desktop systems and printers it was common to have a paper form.  Copies of this form would be used for any number of tasks (fax cover sheets are a common example most people can relate to) and then when there weren't any copies left you would make a new set of copies.  The cardinal sin for the admin staff was of course the person who took the original and used it instead of copying it.  Want to really get on the Admin staff's bad side wipe out 3 or 4 originals and they will hunt you down...

At any rate now that we have PC's and easy access to printers the separate set of file folders containing originals hidden from non-admin eyes is pretty much a thing of the past.  These documents are typically stored on a central Intranet server like SharePoint.  However, in many cases a limited version of the same problem still exists.  Now people will take the copy that is on the server and open it for customization.  Then without thinking they save that copy and it goes right back to the server.  In minor cases they've just poluted the baseline copy that's sitting on the server - but in extreme cases they could so modify the original that its almost useless as the original.  The solution of course is to make such original copies read only, except now instead of having them under lock and key in a big old file cabinet - they sit online marked read-only or checked out to the one trusted individual who won't overright them...  It's the same solution to the problem, just implemented with 21st century technology instead of physical copies.

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Sorry for the long delay and somewhat sparse posts over the last few weeks (OK Months) but I've been a little busy with the latest version of the Professional Visual Basic book to go along with Visual Studio 2008 and VB 9.  However, I reached a milestone last night - OK theoretically it was early this morning.  I caught up with my publisher.  I've turned in all my draft chapters and returned all of the edited chapters that were returned to me to date.  I'm not yet done because there are more edits that need to be returned to me - of course the fact I turned in the draft late might be impacting that... but for tonight at least I don't have any authoring commitments... except I'm supposed to start that magazine article...