Office 2003

With Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft has made it clear that they envision the Office suite as the primary productivity environment for the knowledge worker. To achieve this end, Microsoft Office 2003 offers complete integration with SharePoint Services. This means that end users can create sites, invite participants , manage lists, and share documents seamlessly using nothing more than Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

The primary mechanisms that interface users with SharePoint Services are two special types of sites called workspaces. Office 2003 supports two types of workspaces depending upon the product you are using. If you are primarily interested in collaborating around a document, then Office can create a document workspace. On the other hand, if you are more interested in focusing on a meeting with colleagues, then you can use Office to create a meeting workspace .

Document workspaces can be associated with any document contained in the SharePoint Services document repository. These workspaces allow multiple people to view and edit documents while keeping track of changes and versions. Along with the document management support, a document workspace also provides related lists such as tasks . Figure 2-3 shows a typical document workspace.

Figure 2-3: A document workspace

Meeting workspaces are associated with meeting requests sent from Microsoft Outlook. When sending out meeting requests , you can set up a meeting workspace for the attendees to use. The workspace keeps track of things like the meeting agenda, assigned tasks, and results. Figure 2-4 shows a typical meeting workspace.

Figure 2-4: A meeting workspace

In addition to direct integration with SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office 2003 includes a new form-creation application called InfoPath. InfoPath allows end users to fill out a form online that can be used to programmatically populate a number of line-of-business systems. The idea behind InfoPath is to allow end users to enter information into one form instead of having to rekey the same information into many systems.

InfoPath ties neatly into SharePoint Services because the document repository can become the primary storage location for all InfoPath forms. Furthermore, because InfoPath is XML-based, it works well with BizTalk Server to help integrate systems into the SharePoint Services platform.