Hi,

I am having a hard determining which technology to use to store these xl
files while maintaining flexibility of use.

Business Problem:
This is a continuing process.
Step 1
- 1 book for a each region - contains only 1 sheet to gather data.
- need to be able to keep several versions of a single regions over time
- only some users can edit these files (they are edited at any time).
Step 2
- when a file has been updated and reviewed by admin, he pushes it to
publication. At that point, files are broken into data pieces into a star
schema ms server 2k.
Step 3
- end users query the db to generate basic reports.

Basic Requirements:
1- need to store both data + formats of the centralized excel files in Step
1 & 2 .
2- if an admin decides to add a row, it has to be added in all files, all
regions, all versions (with a default value)

Once the data is published into a star schema db (Step2), everything is fine.
I have however some issues concerning Step1: what technology to use to store
the file while keeping required functionality (eg formatting, keeping
formulas, comments) and being able to control access and versioning, being
able to control global addition/deletion of rows and columns, tracking who is
editing it...
SharePoint is out of question unfortunatelly which i guess would have been
nice for the CHeckIn/Out feature and the versioning.

I was thinking about saving each excel file as XML and sending the XML
string to the MS Sql 2k db as 1 record into a blob column.
I am just not sure whether or not this would be the easiest and whether this
will end up being an issue later down the road.
There was a reason why we didn't want them on a shared drive, but can't
remember it right now.

Anybody has an idea or an advice.
--
Regards,
Sébastien
<http://www.ondemandanalysis.com