Integrating with MS Office

Given that you are reading this book, the chance that you use MS Office for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations is rather high. Therefore, this section is important for you. SharePoint will not change the way you are working with Office documents, but it will enhance the functionality, making many things a lot easier than they are without using SharePoint. What features you can expect to have depends on what version of MS Office you are using.

The story is this: MS Office 2007 was released together with SharePoint 2007 at the end of 2006. They were built to be integrated, just like the previous SharePoint 2003 and Office 2003. If you use Office 2003 along with SharePoint 2007, you will get a lot of the functionality in SharePoint 2007, but not everything. Using older MS Office versions, such as 2000 or XP, will allow such a user to read and save documents to SharePoint 2007, but nothing more. The reason is that these older versions of MS Office do not know about SharePoint, so they lack this integration capability. Do not expect Microsoft to release an update for any version previous of MS Office 2007, and frankly if you've seen what Office 2007 can do, you'll want to upgrade - it is both much easier to work with and has a lot of new features.

The following list gives you an idea about what to expect when running Office 2000/XP versions with SharePoint 2007:

• q File Save Integration: Microsoft Office 2000 integrates with Windows SharePoint Services. Users can open and save files stored on SharePoint sites. They can also receive alerts in Outlook 2000.

• q Basic Data Integration: Microsoft Office XP provides for data integration with SharePoint sites. Users can view properties and metadata for files stored on SharePoint sites. They can also export list data to Microsoft Excel 2002.

• q Contextual Integration: SharePoint integrates fully into the business tasks that users perform every day with Microsoft Office 2003 Editions.

Microsoft produced a white paper describing Office integration with SharePoint 2007 called "Fair, Good, Better, Best." Fair is what you get with Office 2000, good means the functionality achieved by MS Office XP, better is what you get with MS Office 2003, and best requires you to run Office 2007. Note that there is no technical problem in using SharePoint in a mixed MS Office environment, but it will place an extra burden on the Help desk and the support team, since each version will support different SharePoint 2007 features. A more detailed comparison of the four MS Office versions is presented in the following table (including new SharePoint 2007 features in the second half of the list):

Open table as spreadsheet

Feature	Office Version
Save and open files from SharePoint sites	Office 2000:	Yes
	Office XP:	Yes
	Office 2003:	Yes, enhanced (Office plus FrontPage, InfoPath, OneNote, Microsoft Project, Publisher, Visio)
	Office 2007:	Like Office 2003, plus SharePoint Designer
Create new documents in web browser	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	Yes (Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Word)
	Office 2003:	Yes (Excel, FrontPage, InfoPath, PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Publisher, Word)
	Office 2007:	Like Office 2003, plus SharePoint Designer
Collect document columns automatically	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Change document columns in both Office and the web browser	Office 2000:	Data stored, but not displayed
	Office XP:	Yes
	Office 2003:	Yes, enhanced (Excel, FrontPage, InfoPath, PowerPoint, Visio, Word)
	Office 2007:	Like Office 2003, plus SharePoint Designer
Track document versions	Office 2000:	No. Use web browser to view and manage document versions.
	Office XP:	No. Use web browser to view and manage document versions.
	Office 2003:	Enhanced (Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Word)
	Office 2007:	Like Office 2003, and can also compare document versions very easily
Check out and check in documents	Office 2000:	No. Use web browser to manually check out and check in documents.
	Office XP:	No. Use web browser to manually check out and check in documents.
	Office 2003:	Yes, enhanced (Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Word). Use web browser to manually check out and check in other types of documents.
	Office 2007:	Like Office 2003
Upload multiple documents	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Use inline discussions	Office 2000:	Yes
	Office XP:	Yes
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Create document workspace	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Create meeting workspace	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes, with Outlook 2003
	Office 2007:	Yes, with Outlook 2007
Synchronize calendar, tasks, and contact list in SharePoint sites	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes, but only from SharePoint to Outlook 2003
	Office 2007:	Yes, two-way synchronization with Outlook 2007
Alert integration with Outlook	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Display lists as RSS information	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
Using Excel services	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	Yes, can publish to SharePoint site from Excel
	Office 2007:	Yes, same as Office 2003
Access to business data catalog	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes, allows Office 2007 documents to display content in external data sources, using SharePoint 2007 lists
InfoPath forms services	Office 2000:	Yes
	Office XP:	Yes
	Office 2003:	Yes
	Office 2007:	Yes
InfoPath forms in Office clients	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes
Document information panel	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes, can display and modify document properties in customizable InfoPath-based forms in Office clients
Access to workflows	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes, can start and complete workflow tasks from within the Office 2007 client
PowerPoint slide libraries	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes
Use record management	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes, allows Office 2007 documents to be stored in a record repository
Compose and publish Wikis and blogs using Word	Office 2000:	No
	Office XP:	No
	Office 2003:	No
	Office 2007:	Yes