Word Document Co-Authoring Locking of Comments as Read-Only

Hello,

We are using co-authoring for a Word document that a number of people from disparate locations will be working on. We are using Word 2010. The document is hosted using the Office Web Services in SharePoint 2010.

So, multiple users can be in the document at the same time. Or, it may be the case that users are in the document at different times based on location, etc. We want to support both.

One of the things that users will be doing is adding comments using the built-in Word comments option. We want to ensure that these comments are locked and read-only, such that another user either co-authoring the document at the same time in parallel, or coming in later, can't delete the comment. We want the comments to be locked to user.

I know that in co-authoring, a paragraph will become locked when two people are in the document at the same time.

This is something entirely different, however. We want the comments made in a co-authored document to become historical artifacts that can be reviewed. To do that, we want to prevent users from deleting other users' comments. Is there any way to make the comments read-only or locked once they are created?

If this isn't possible, is there another way to do this within SharePoint? I know that there are a number of co-authoring solutions like Google Docs. This won't work, however. Our requirement is to be able to allow multiple users to edit a document, sometimes in parallel. They can erase or edit what others have written; however, all comments to the document must be preserved and not deleted. These do need to be line-item as they are in Word; we can't just create a forum or something for comments that is separate from the document. The two should be tightly coupled.

Thank you,
Joseph Irvine