Question : MS Office 2007 & 2010: Best practices for implementing centralized management of default templates?

In our organization, we are about 20 users and have a centralized managed document template folder residing on a file server. The folder is shared with read only permissions to all users. Users' document template folder is redirected to that folder at login. So when the user opens Word, it opens it with the custom default template. This setup has been tolerated with Office 2007, but with Office 2010 we've decided to look for another architectural solution.

What are the best practices in a situation where you want all users to use the same default template for Office 2007 (and 2010) applications? I'm specifically looking for how I should distribute the template for all users while keeping the management of it centralized.

Answer : MS Office 2007 & 2010: Best practices for implementing centralized management of default templates?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890294/en-us  <--- got all possibilitys for specifing the sharepoint lib as default template. I´d say method 2 (with group policy) - but I don´t know your company layout.

on your following questions, yes it will prevent the locking of the normal.dotm/x file.

'Cannot save normal.dotm due to file being read only' - since a normal user will not get write access, they will get this problem, but the admin got the possibility to change it and reupload it (I´m not totally sure if you´ll need an exclusive opening shift while startup to safe it)

I hope my comment was helpful - if you need further assitance feel free to ask.

regards,
Lenin