Creating a Document Workspace from Outlook

Frequently, you might want to share useful documents, such as procedural documentation, sales figures, or calendars, with other members of your organization. You can send a document to your co-workers as an attachment to an e-mail message, but if several people return edited versions, you will have to take the time to merge all the changes into one document. If you have permission to add content to your organization's collaboration site, you can add the document to a document library on the site and other people can review and edit the document from there.

You can quickly create a document workspace for one or more files from Outlook instead of from the collaboration site by sending the files as shared attachments to an e-mail message. Shared attachments are made available within a document workspace on a collaboration site, and can be automatically updated with changes that recipients make.

See Also For information about creating workspaces for collaborating on meetings, see the sidebar "Creating a Meeting Workspace" in Chapter 6, "Managing Appointments, Events, and Meetings."

In this topic, we demonstrate the process of creating a document workspace on a collaboration site from Outlook.

Follow these steps:

1. Open a new message window, address the message to the people you want to invite to the document workspace, and insert the message subject.

2. On the Message tab, in the Include group, click the Attach File button.

   The Insert File dialog box opens.

3. Browse to and select the file(s) you want to share through a document library, and then click Insert.

4. In the Include group, click the Dialog Box Launcher.

   The Attachment Options task pane opens.

   

5. Under Send attachments as, select the Shared attachments option.

6. In the Create Document Workspace at box, type the address of your collaboration site (or if the site address appears in the list, click it), and then press the key.

   An invitation to the document workspace that will be created when you send the e-mail message appears in the content area.

   

7. Send the message.

   A document workspace containing the file or files you attached to the message is created on the specified collaboration site. The message recipients are added to the workspace as members; you don't need to take any other action to give them permission to edit the document, but you can add other members to the workspace if you want.

   You receive a message confirming that the workspace was successfully created, and the message recipients receive the invitation message. Each message contains a link to the document workspace.

Creating Group Schedules

When organizing a meeting, it's helpful to be able to see when attendees are available without having to contact each person individually. With Outlook, you can If you want to find a time at which several people are all available, and your organization is not running Exchange Server 2007, you can create a group schedule shows the combined schedules of multiple people and resources.

To create a group schedule:

1. Display your calendar, and then on the Actions menu, click View Group Schedules.

2. In the Group Schedules dialog box, click New. In the Create New Group Schedule dialog box, type the schedule name (for example, Management Team), and then click OK.

3. In the scheduling window, add members to the group by clicking in the Group Members list and then typing a name or an e-mail alias, or by clicking Add Others and then selecting group members from your address book.

   The group schedule immediately displays availability for each group member. You can point to any appointment or meeting to see information about it. Information will not be available if an appointment is marked as private.

   

You can view an up-to-date group schedule at any time by clicking View Group You can view an up-to-date group schedule at any time by clicking View Group Schedules on the Actions menu.