Microsoft Office Integration with Windows SharePoint Services


Many Microsoft Office menus and features are integrated closely with Windows SharePoint Services features. You can use Windows SharePoint Services functionality not only from a browser, but also from within your Microsoft Office applications. For example, you can create a new SharePoint site and save your files to it without leaving your Microsoft Office application.

A SharePoint site’s collaborative content-including documents, lists, events, calendars, task assignments, blogs, wikis, and membership rosters-can be read and edited within Microsoft Office applications.

To share a particular document, or a task, Windows SharePoint Services provides a specific site environment called a Document Workspace. You can create a workspace site from a Microsoft Office 2007 application or from a browser. When using Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, and Microsoft Office OneNote 2007, users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and assign tasks from within Microsoft Office 2007 applications while working on documents stored in SharePoint sites.

For more information about working with Document Workspaces, refer to Chapter 7, Working with Document Workspaces.”

There are different levels of integration between various versions of Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services. The 2007 Microsoft Office System provides a tight, native, out-of-the box rich integration with Windows SharePoint Services, with many new and significantly enhanced features in comparison with Microsoft Office 2003. Earlier versions of Microsoft Office, such as Microsoft Office 2000 and Microsoft Office XP, also provide some integration, but it is considerably simpler and more basic.

Office 2000 provides a file save integration with Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can open and save files stored on SharePoint sites from your Office 2000 applications and receive alerts in Microsoft Office Outlook 2000. Office XP provides additional data integration, including the ability to have interactive access to data stored on SharePoint sites. For example, you can export list data from SharePoint sites to Microsoft Office Excel 2002 and view properties and metadata for files that are stored on SharePoint sites. However, Office 2000 and Office XP are not integrated with many other features of Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you cannot use Office 2000 or Office XP applications to create workspace sites.

Tip 

You can perform these tasks on the SharePoint site by using the browser.

Microsoft Office 2003 adds more integration features. With Office 2003, you can use Windows SharePoint Services to create documents and workspaces, organize team meetings and activities, and access and analyze data from SharePoint sites. You can also use data integration between Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, moving data to and from the SharePoint site and creating databases linked to data stored on SharePoint sites.

In the 2007 Microsoft Office System, integration with Windows SharePoint Services is enhanced further. When using Office Word 2007, Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, Office InfoPath 2007, Office Project 2007, and Office OneNote 2007, you can directly interact with information stored in SharePoint sites without manually downloading the content. Using Word 2007, you can create and post to a blog on your SharePoint blog site. In addition, Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 allow you to access and manage content types in document metadata in the SharePoint library.

While all 2007 Microsoft Office client applications are tightly integrated with Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 provides the closest, feature-rich integration. With Office Outlook 2007, you can create and manage sites for sharing documents and organizing meetings. Outlook 2007 provides read and write access to SharePoint items such as calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents. In addition, Outlook 2007 also provides significant improvements to offline support, including the ability to check out and edit documents when offline, as well as bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks. Other enhanced features in Outlook 2007 include roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites as well as the unified view of personal and SharePoint tasks.

Tip 

Microsoft Office Groove 2007 also enables bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.

For more information about integration between Windows SharePointServices and Outlook 2007, refer to Chapter 11, “Using Windows SharePoint Services with Outlook 2007.”




Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services Version 3. 0 Step by Step
Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services Version 3. 0 Step by Step
ISBN: 735623635
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 201

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