Using Office 2000 and XP with SharePoint


Office 2000 users can access SharePoint sites through their browsers or through the File menu, but won't have access to the "Shared Workspace" tools from within Word, Excel, Visio, and PowerPoint.

Previous versions of the Office products do not have all the same tools and functionality as the 2003 versions, so if a 2003 document is going to be accessed extensively from a previous version of the product, it should be saved in a compatible format.

Office XP was designed to integrate with the SharePoint Team Services and provides additional tools not available in Office 2000. An overview of the collaboration and document-management tools in previous versions of Word and Excel are reviewed in this chapter.

Word 2000 and XP's Collaborative Features

Before launching into the enhanced capabilities of Word 2003 and SharePoint, it makes sense to take a look at the collaborative features built into the two previous versions of the products. This puts the new features of Word 2003 in perspective and shows that the products have been evolving through the addition of enhanced collaboration and sharing features and tools for some time.

Word 2000 and XP offered some collaborative features to enhance sharing and collaboration on documents that even many long-time users might not be aware of or might not have used. For example, a NetMeeting discussion server had to be available on the network to enable Word 2000 or XP users to schedule NetMeetings from within a document, or to engage in threaded discussions.

These previous versions of Word also offered a "Versions" feature in the File menu that could be activated for a Word document. With this feature activated, each time the document was saved, Word would record it as a different version, and comments could be added by the Word user. These comments and the different versions could be viewed by selecting File, Versions from the menu and could be opened or deleted, or the comments for each version could be viewed. No additional files were created; Word just tracked the differences between the documents. One drawback to this feature was if the document was deleted, all revisions went with it. Another drawback was that the version information was not available until the document was opened and the version information reviewed.

Office Server Extensions in Office 2000 allowed Word users to actually subscribe to documents and folders and receive emails if the information was edited, deleted, or moved, or if a new document was created in that folder. Office Server Extensions extended the functionality of web servers and added the capability of publishing and managing documents and facilitating collaboration.

Word 2000 offered the capability to save a document as a web page and preview it in web format (*.htm). Word XP added additional options to the saving process, allowing saves to *.htm as well as *.html, *.mht, and *.mhtml. Although not a widely used feature by most users, this did enable web designers to post Word documents easily to company websites or intranets. The source code could be viewed from within Word to assist the Web with troubleshooting or fine-tuning the document for web access.

The Track Changes feature in Word enables different people to collaborate on the document while tracking the changes and displaying which changes have been made and who made them. This is a useful feature when a number of users are modifying a single document because it shows the history of the development of the document and allows changes to be undone or accepted during the editing process.




Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed
Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed (2nd Edition) (Unleashed)
ISBN: 0672328038
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 288

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