My team needs to create a system that would track a lot of properties associated with Word docs. We don't know whether to build this from a doc library or some sort of list. In other words, what is the foundation that we start with? I don't think we need an elaborate workflow with a lot of rules. Mostly when an author uploads a doc, we need to force them to enter who will approve the doc, its priority, desired date due, previous doc number. Also, it would be enormously helpful if the system could generate a unique "ticket number" that would be separate from the doc number. Is it possible to set up a ticket form to contain this information? Finally, we do not have the budget for Designer or Visual Studio or a programmer. We've been told to find a solution in Server 2007. Jeff

Designer 2007 is free: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42 If you don't have a budget for free software you may want to consider appealing to your budget committee :P It sounds like you may consider creating a custom InfoPath form which all of the details to be input and re-direct upload links to point to the new form, and completes the upload to the document center or list via a workflow. Also, you say SP Server 2007, are you speaking of WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007?

Well, this is a big help already. I think I can persuade the company to pay for "free." The administrator who knows which server version we have is not in today. I just know that clicking the Help button on one of our site pages loads a page that says SharePoint Server 2007. I'll ask later about the version. I'll go to the training to learn about custom Infopaths. It sounds like this provides more functionality than just creating a task list with custom fields. It occurs to me that there is one critical feature we need. As the editor updates the ticket status, the system needs to send out emails to the author and others (depending on the status. Is that what SP calls an alert?

Emails after a document change can easily be done via an out-of-box workflow or settings on a list (alerts).