Question: “When user B saves a word document that is owned by user A, the updated file is now owned by user B. Why is Samba doing this? How do I fix this?”

Answer: Word does the following when you modify/change a Word document: MS Word creates a new document with a temporary name. Word then closes the old document and deletes it, then renames the new document to the original document name. There is no mechanism by which Samba can in any way know that the new document really should be owned by the owners of the original file. Samba has no way of knowing that the file will be renamed by MS Word. As far as Samba is able to tell, the file that gets created is a new file, not one that the application (Word) is updating.

There is a workaround to solve the permissions problem. It involves understanding how you can manage file system behavior from within the smb.conf file, as well as understanding how UNIX file systems work. Set on the directory in which you are changing Word documents: chmod g+s `directory_name'. This ensures that all files will be created with the group that owns the directory. In smb.conf share declaration section set:

These two settings will ensure that all directories and files that get created in the share will be readable/writable by the owner and group set on the directory itself.