Synchronizing with SharePoint

One of the strengths of technology in a corporate setting is in enabling collaboration between coworkers or departments. Microsoft's premier solution in collaboration technology today is called SharePoint, and it is a collection of technologies, built on Windows, that let administrators easily create browser-based portals for users to collaborate, share documents, create and maintain lists, and perform a number of other tasks. One of the strengths of SharePoint is that not only can it be used on an intranet, it can also be published to an extranet.

One of the significant frustrations that users and administrators had with previous versions of Outlook and SharePoint revolved around linking lists like contacts or calendars. You could access a SharePoint contacts list, for example, using Outlook 2003; you could even synchronize it and access it offline. What you couldn't do was edit any of those contact items in Outlook or have any additions synchronize back to the SharePoint server. The same was true for calendars as well, of course. Because it required extra steps to go back to the SharePoint site to make any edits, a lot of users simply skipped it and didn't make the best use of the SharePoint/Outlook connection.

With Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007, now you can do two-way synchronization so that you can edit those calendars, contacts, or other lists in Outlook and have the changes reflected in SharePoint. As an Exchange administrator, you should be aware of the capabilities that SharePoint 2007 brings to the table because, increasingly, things you are in the habit of doing with Exchange public folders can (and will) be done with SharePoint lists instead.