Consider carefully the best combination of Office System 2003 products for the organization's needs. The enhanced integration between many of the Office System 2003 products and SharePoint 2003 opens up many doors for creative and productive uses of applications that were considered for specialists only (such as Project, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access).
Office 2003 Professional is required if users are to have access to the SharePoint Datasheet List Control which provides an Excel-like editing environment for editing content in Windows SharePoint Services. If Office 2003 Professional is not installed, the user will receive an error message when she tries to use the tool "Edit in Datasheet" from within a document library or a list.
Using metadata effectively allows the user of a Word 2003, Excel 2003, PowerPoint 2003, or Visio 2003 document to see additional information about the document that should help him understand what state of completion the document is in, what projects it is connected to, and other information that will help him use the document.
Document workspaces can be powerful to encourage other employees to collaborate on a document if the right members are added to the workspace, and other related documents and URLs to related sites are added.
Creating document workspaces under a personal site can be advantageous because the creator will immediately know where to find sites she has created and is then responsible for managing, deleting, or archiving them when their purpose has been fulfilled.
Excel 2003 should be considered mandatory for SharePoint 2003 site administrators because SharePoint 2003 lists and libraries have limited printing capabilities and do not offer the full range of features that Excel 2003 does for data analysis, graphing, and exporting.
Excel 2003 can be used regularly to take "snapshots" of the data contained in SharePoint 2003 lists, which are live and changing, and save them to secure locations. If the SharePoint 2003 list is altered improperly, there is then a copy of a previous version of the information to refer to. This avoids needing to restore from a tape drive.
Use Outlook 2003 to quickly create document workspaces for attached documents when there are additional related documents, and where collaboration is required to complete the primary document.
Use Outlook 2003 to create meeting workspaces when meetings are being scheduled that involve many people (more than 10) and where additional documents are connected to the meeting, and collaboration before or after the meeting is required.
