Chapter 7: Office Integration | Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

SharePoint 2007 is a great tool in itself; you can use it straight out of the box to build sites for an intranet, an extranet, public Internet sites, and team sites. It will help users find the information they need, quickly and easily. But the real magic comes when you integrate other products with SharePoint! There are lots of products that can use SharePoint's document libraries directly for storing files and documents, but one product family really shines when it comes to SharePoint integration: MS Office, which most people associate with the typical desktop applications (MS Word, MS Excel, and so on). There are also a lot of other programs that have an excellent integration with SharePoint, especially MS Outlook, MS OneNote, and MS InfoPath. In fact, today it is hard to find any program from Microsoft that does not have some sort of integration with SharePoint 2007; it is safe to say that SharePoint is the central information database in a Microsoft-centric IT environment.

This chapter will tell you how this integration works, and what differentiates previous versions of MS Office from the current MS Office 2007 release. You will find a lot of examples and step-by-step instructions on how to use a number of applications together with SharePoint 2007. All of this information is valid for both WSS and MOSS, unless stated otherwise.

Important

Entire books are devoted to each MS Office component, and more books are devoted to their integration. This chapter obviously can't cover the breadth and depth of MS Office integration. Instead, the focus is on knowledge and techniques that can be useful with SharePoint administration. Specifically, we will focus on Outlook, InfoPath, and OneNote.

MS Office Product Suite

The most commonly used product family today, all categories included, is the MS Office product suite. It has been around for more than a decade, but today it is hard to find an organization running anything older than MS Office 2000. The fact is that this product suite works so well that a lot of organizations still use MS Office XP or 2003, while an increasingly number have upgraded to MS Office 2007. It should come as no surprise that MS Office 2007 has the best integration with SharePoint 2007, and this is by design! A lot of features in SharePoint 2007, such as workflows, simply need an Office version that is built to support that type of functionality; older Office versions will have limited, or no, support for a number of SharePoint 2007 features.

Important

In Chapter 1 there is a table that compares the SharePoint functionality among different MS Office versions.

Do not expect to see any updates released for older MS Office versions that will extend their support for SharePoint 2007. Except for one thing (and this is not really a SharePoint feature): support for the new XML-based file format, introduced in MS Office 2007, through a free add-on named Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack(MOCP). It is important for SharePoint users, since it will allow users with older MS Office programs to work with documents created with MS Office 2007, also for documents stored in a SharePoint document library. To download this MOCP extension of MS Office XP and MS Office 2003, go to http://www.microsoft.com and search for Office Compatibility Pack, or use this link directly:

     www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-     C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

In order to better understand what you can do with these MS Office versions, you need to try some examples. Say that you have a SharePoint 2007 site named IT and that this site contains a document library named Info. To make it more interesting, this Info library has two extra columns: Product and Vendor. It also has been configured to force a checkout procedure, whenever a user needs to update a document. Finally, there is a workflow approval process defined, which will trigger every time a new document is created. In the detailed descriptions below, we assume that you want to use MS Word to work with documents.

MS Office 2000

So let's start with MS Office 2000, and see how that works, according to the example above. This version of Office has a very limited integration with SharePoint 2007. Basically, all you can do is read, write, modify, and delete documents in a SharePoint library:

q Create a document: The user must create the document in Office 2000, then save the document to the URL that points to the Info library in the IT site. It is not possible to use the New button for the Info library.
q Modify a document: The user can open a document in the Info library, then modify it, and then save it back.
q Using InfoPath Forms: There is no MS InfoPath (IP) application in Office 2000, so the only way to open and use IP forms is to configure SharePoint Forms Service to display these forms as web pages.

And that is about it. The conclusion is that a combination of MS Office 2000 and SharePoint 2007 is not the ideal solution. I strongly recommend that anyone using MS Office 2000 upgrade before implementing SharePoint 2007. And remember that Office 2000 is not supported by new service packs or hot fixes anymore. If you have this environment, do yourself a favor and upgrade to Office 2007, okay?

MS Office XP

MS Office XP was released in 2002 and was also known as MS Office 2002. It has some small advantages over MS Office 2000, but not many. Let's see what you can do in this example:

q Create a document: You must create the document in Office XP, and then save the document to the URL that points to the Info library on the IT site. You can also use the New button on the Info library, which is a difference, compared to Office 2000.
q Modify a document: You can open a document in the Info library, then modify it, and then save it back.
q Using InfoPath Forms: There is no MS InfoPath (IP) application in Office XP, so the only way to open and use IP forms is to configure SharePoint Forms Service to display these forms as web pages.

End of story. The conclusion is once again, that a combination of MS Office XP and SharePoint 2007 is not an ideal solution. My recommendation is that anyone using MS Office XP should upgrade before implementing SharePoint 2007. So upgrade, please.

MS Office 2003

Now this is a much better option than any of the two previous Office versions discussed. It was released together with SharePoint 2003 in October 2003; thus, it has a lot of SharePoint functionality built in from start. So, let's see what Office 2003 can do in this example:

q Create a document: You can either use the New button in the Info library or create the new document in Office 2003, then save the document to the URL that points to the Info library in the IT site.
q Modify a document: You can open a document in the Info library, then modify it, and then save it back.
q MS Excel synchronization: With Office 2003, you can export a list from SharePoint to MS Excel 2003, modify its content, and then write the changes back to the SharePoint list.
q MS Access synchronization: You can export a list or library, and display it as a table in MS Access 2003, and then create and print reports.
q Using InfoPath Forms: With Office 2003 came the MS InfoPath 2003 client. It is able to open and allow the user to work with IP forms, using either the full IP client or the Forms Server web client. It is also possible to design and develop new IP forms with InfoPath 2003.
q Document management: In Office 2003, you will find the Task Pane, a special information pane that displays SharePoint-related information directly in the Office 2003 client. For example, you can see and modify the custom columns in the Info library; you can also see the other documents in the same library as that document. There are also links for Check Out/Check In, version history, adding tasks, web links, and creating Document Workspaces in this Task Pane.
q IRM Protection: With Office 2003, you can use the Information Rights Management (IRM) features to protect Office 2003 documents, and Outlook e-mails. The IRM is built upon the Rights Management Server (RMS), mentioned before in this chapter. Using IRM, the Office 2003 user can define advanced security settings for a document or an e-mail, such as prohibit printing, or forward of e-mail.
q Policy templates: Office 2003 documents will follow any policy template defined in SharePoint 2007.

It is clear that Office 2003 is a much better client for a SharePoint 2007 environment. If basic SharePoint integration is all you need, then you will get it from Office 2003. But if you want to use all the new features in SharePoint 2007, such as Excel Services, Business Intelligence, RSS feeds, managing documents offline, and two-way synchronization of tasks, contacts, and calendar events, you will still need to upgrade to Office 2007. If this reason is not enough, then maybe this fact is what you need: The new user interface for MS Office 2007 clients is much easier to use compared to Office 2003, especially for users who see Office as just another set of tools they need to use in order to do their jobs - and we all know that they are about 80 percent of a typical organization.

MS Office 2007

This is the crown jewel when it comes to integration between Office clients and SharePoint 2007. It is specially designed with SharePoint 2007 in mind and is so much easier to use, even for features that were available for previous Office versions. The number of applications in the Office 2007 suite is also larger than before, and most, if not all of these can interact with SharePoint 2007 in one way or another. So let's continue our example with the Info library, and the IT web site, to see what you can do with Office 2007:

q Create a document: You can either use the New button in the Info library or create the new document directly in Office 2007, then save the document to the URL that points to the Info library in the IT site. To help users find the URL, Office 2007 offers several options: a) Use the Office button Publish Document Management Server, which lists SharePoint sites known to this user, or b) Use the File Save dialog box in Office 2007, which is enhanced with a new link called My SharePoint Sites that automatically discovers any sites that the SharePoint administrator publishes using Web services or by local registry entries on the client that are deployed by Group Policy Objects using the Active Directory service.
q Modify a document: The user can open a document in the Info library, then modify it, and then save it back. In Office 2007, you can also make a local copy of documents in your new SharePoint Drafts folder. The next time you open a locally modified copy while online, Office 2007 will ask if you want to update the server copy with your updated version.
q Excel Services: With Excel 2007, you can send a spreadsheet or a chart to the Excel Service in MOSS 2007. This allows you to publish Excel info, including formulas and the like, to other groups of people. They will be able to view and enter values but not make a copy of the spreadsheet itself. Thus, this is a very safe way to make advanced formulas and calculations available to others, without the risk that anyone can copy these formulas.
q MS Access two-way synchronization: You can export a list or library, and display it as a table in MS Access 2003, and then print reports. If you modify the content, you can also write the changes back to the SharePoint list.
q Using InfoPath forms: Use the MS InfoPath 2007 client to create forms, store them in forms libraries, or send them to the Forms Services in MOSS, or to fill in existing forms. InfoPath 2007 can also create customized versions of Document Information Panels in Office 2007 clients. The forms created by InfoPath 2007 can also be opened with a web browser.
q Document Information Panel: All Office 2007 Pro Plus or Enterprise applications now have a new panel that displays and allows a user to modify document metadata. This replaces the Task Pane in Office 2003.The Document Information Panels are really InfoPath 2007 forms, which can be customized to meet a special need for a specific type of document. The Document Information Panel will also display information such as whether the document requires a checkout before editing, and any document policy that is applied to this document. (See Figure 7-1.)

Figure 7-1
q Document management: By using the Office button in Office 2007 and selecting the Server option, a user can do several things, such as perform Check Out/In, view the version history, view workflow tasks, and open Document Management Information, which is similar to the Task Pane in Office 2003. That is, it displays a list of all users with access to a document, allows you to send an e-mail to specified users, creates tasks and links in the site hosting a document, and displays a list of other documents in the current document library.
q Workflows: Office 2007 applications allow the user to start workflows defined for a document library. The user will also see that a document requires workflow actions.
q IRM protection: With Office 2007, you can use the Information Rights Management (IRM) features to protect Office 2007 documents and Outlook e-mails. The IRM is built on the Rights Management Server (RMS), mentioned before in this chapter. Using IRM, the Office 2007 user can define advanced security settings for a document or an e-mail, such as prohibit printing or the forwarding of e-mail.
q Policy templates: Office 2007 documents will follow any policy template defined in SharePoint 2007 for a library.
q Slide library: You can publish individual PowerPoint 2007 slides to a slide library in SharePoint 2007, then you can pick exactly the slides you need from that library to create a new Power Point 2007 presentation. If the original slide is modified, PowerPoint 2007 will indicate that and allow you to update your presentation.
q Web Content: With Word 2007, you can create, edit, and publish web content in SharePoint.
q Wiki and Blog: Directly from Word 2007, you can create posts in wiki and blog sites, hosted by SharePoint 2007.
q Comparing versions: Office 2007 has a great feature that allows you to compare document versions. For example, look at Figure 7-2; it shows how Word 2007 compares two document versions. Original Document and Revised Document are compared in the middle pane, Compared Document, and all changes are indicated by underlined text. In the left pane, all details about the modifications are listed.

Figure 7-2
q Barcodes and labels: With MOSS policies, you can specify that printed copies of a document will contain automatically printed barcodes and text labels; this will only work with Office 2007 applications.

The list speaks for itself. An organization that invests in MOSS should also implement Office 2007. Even if you go for just WSS 3.0, Office 2007 is the best option. You will see a lot of examples, and Try It Out instructions in Chapter 9, on how to use these features in Office 2007.