R – What files are you allowed to modify in SharePoint 2007

Here is a blog post which seem to be exactly the solution of your problem.

Basically they create a custom field in the document library and use event receivers to keep the current version of the document in this field. The "trick" is that on the client side this custom field shows up as a property of the document the value of which you can easily embed into the document's contents.

I'm not sure why changing the field won't increase the version of the document, but I guess it is because you're only changing metadata, not the actual document.

They do use a little VBA script which runs on the client side, but it doesn't require any client side deployment as it is downloaded with the document. However I'm not sure if any security settings changes on the client side may be needed to allow the script to run.

Out of the box, you can modify the navigation for a Publishing site manually.

I assume that you are after a more automated way to do this. Unfortunately, the way to modify the navigation for a PublishingWeb is through the object model and the PublishingWeb.CurrentNavigationNodes object, which would require a timer job or some other method to update as pages are edited/added/deleted.

This is non-trivial and you will still need to create a solution/feature package. The other way is to create a custom navigation provider. The issue with both of these options (aside from the actual coding and release) is caching the navigation structure. We have used the standard web cache for the object holding the navigation structure, but using the standard user browsing (i.e. the menu code itself) to kick of a refresh of the navigation is fraught with threading issues.