Section 15.5. SharePoint and Groove

15.5. SharePoint and Groove

If you work for a large company or study at a large university, you're probably hooked up to a network. If someone has installed either Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Groove 2007 on that network, you don't have to rely on the poor man's collaboration strategy described on page 430 (email your presentation to your colleagues, wait for them to email you back, and painstakingly adjust your presentation based on their feedback).

Instead, you can use SharePoint's options to create and manage an approval process and track slideshow revisions, and you can use Groove to conduct real-time review sessions. Read on for details.

15.5.1. SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a program that lets folks share files over a network. If your computer's connected to a network computer running SharePoint, you can use PowerPoint's Office button Publish Publish Slides, Office button Publish Document Management Server, and Office button Publish Create Document Workspace options to:

• Control revisions and track changes automatically. After you save your presentation to a SharePoint server (in Microsoft-speak, a document workspace ), you can set up SharePoint so that folks have to "check out" copies of your presentation, and then "check" them back in after they've made changes. SharePoint handles all the revision tracking and merging automatically similar to the way PowerPoint 2003 tracked revisions, but better.

• Put together "virtual" presentations made up of slides other people have created. You and your colleagues can save your presentations as individually searchable slides in a SharePoint slide library. Then, you get to reuse your colleagues' work, and your presentation stays up-to-date automatically. (You can tell PowerPoint to notify you automatically when someone updates a slide you've added to your presentation.)

• Create and manage a formal approval process. If you work for a large corporation or a government office, creating a PowerPoint presentation may be just the first step in a painstakingly tedious approval process. To help streamline this process, you can use SharePoint to specify who needs to review your presentation, how many days they have to get back to you, which folks are responsible for adding which additional content, who's holding everybody else up, and so on. You can even gather electronic signatures to document each step.

Because only a small percentage of folks who use PowerPoint also have access to a SharePoint server (which used to be called SharePoint services ), this book doesn't cover SharePoint in detail. Instead, to get the latest information on purchasing, installing, and using SharePoint, check out www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver/highlights.mspx.

15.5.2. Groove

If your computer's connected to a network computer running Microsoft Office Groove 2007, you can use Groove options to call an electronic review meeting. Then, no matter what companies your attendees work for or what countries or time zones they're in, everybody gets to see the same set of slides in real-time and discuss them via instant messaging.

Groove is new to Microsoft Office 2007. For help in finding, downloading, and using it, visit www.microsoft.com/office/groove/default.mspx.