I don't have an answer and someone else may. However, many users have
decided to distribute these resources to personal directories (local or
networked) through the user login script. The personal folder's contents are
checked against the central location and updated/revised as necessary. The
main reason for doing this is to allow the global templates to be edited
without everyone else closing Word.

I suspect that the same thing can be accomplished by making the folder
read-only for all users except the person who does the editing.