Back in the bad old days of version control (thinking of VSS here), I was overall pretty satisfied with how the check-in/check-out mechanics worked for Word docs and the like. In this case you have the benefit of the sequential workflow, in fact enforced or hinted by the tool itself, while also getting rid of the recurrent weakness of email-based document storage. There were plenty of other things to dislike about VSS (like, pretty much the rest of them) but it wasn't so bad for maintaining documents.
