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Office, SharePoint and Exchange 2007 – Better Together

  • Article

One of the topics that I frequently present on at conferences is the Office system and why it is “better” to use the Office 2007 client with the 2007 versions of the SharePoint and Exchange server products.

The presentation that I use for most of these sessions is a summary of many of the key items discussed in the Office/SharePoint “better together” whitepaper. It also touches upon some of the areas discussed in this Exchange 2007 feature comparison for the Exchange server with different Outlook and Outlook Web Access clients.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • Enterprise Content Management: Content Management process integrated into the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 clients. This helps increase the adoption and usage of your SharePoint site and integrates critical functionality such as workflow and document properties, including metadata that is used to drive SharePoint views and improve search results.
  • PowerPoint Slide Libraries: Publish slides for central storage, reuse and change notification. Slide libraries add a great amount of business value by making sure that key corporate messages, content and branding are being reused and kept in sync.
  • Excel Services: Publish spreadsheets for server hosting, web viewing and component access control. The Excel Services whitepaper and my recent Excel for Business Intelligence (BI) blog post have additional details.
  • Outlook / SharePoint Integration: Bi-directional sync of calendars, tasks, contacts, and discussion boards. Offline access to document libraries. The Outlook Exchange website has a great article that walks thru all of the details.
  • Outlook / Exchange 2007 Utilization: Unified communications, Managed folders, Scheduling enhancements and more. This article reviews these and other new Outlook 2007 capabilities in greater detail.
  • Electronic Forms: Publish e-forms for e-mail and browser based form completion. My InfoPath blog post provides more information on this and other ways to leverage InfoPath.
  • OneNote / SharePoint Integration: You can have OneNote automatically synchronize shared notebooks with SharePoint, which can then be searched and viewed by people with the appropriate permissions. More information on OneNote can be found in this blog post.
  • Groove / SharePoint Integration: Direct synchronization between Groove workspaces and SharePoint document libraries. This whitepaper demonstrates how you can use Groove to securely collaborate and extend SharePoint to customers and partners that are outside of your organization and those with the need for off-line functionality or access to content in low network bandwidth scenarios.
  • Access / SharePoint Integration: Host Access data on SharePoint sites, use either browser or Access client to work with data. This enables you to move Access data to SharePoint lists and also helps with querying and joining multiple SharePoint lists and other data sources. More details can be found here.