Executive Summary:
Microsoft Office Outlook is a useful application for messaging, calendaring, and scheduling, but not as useful for document management. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 was designed as a content management platform but users hesitate to learn yet another new interface. With the integration points provided by Microsoft in the most recent Office release, you can use SharePoint and Outlook together to fully leverage the strengths of each product.
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Microsoft Outlook has long been the
center of Microsoft's collaborative user experience. Information workers rely on integrated messaging and
calendaring to help manage their daily tasks.
The result is that most users open Outlook first
thing in the morning and shut it down only at
the end of the day.
Although email is great for applications
such as integrated calendars and scheduling,
it's not as good for uses like document and content management. Your Microsoft Exchange
Server administrators have a long list of reasons
why sending large attachments through email
isn't the best way to share documents. However, few of them offer reasonable alternatives
that have low impact on your users' habits, and
changing users' work habits, especially when
those changes reduce convenience, is difficult.
Enter Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
(WSS).
SharePoint was designed as a collaboration
platform and therefore is a better medium for
sharing content than any messaging system.
However, one of its main flaws—and the biggest obstacle to getting organizations to deploy
SharePoint—is its Web-based interface. Users
don't want to learn yet another interface for
managing their documents. It's inconvenient
to pull up a Web browser and navigate to a
specific site just to upload or download a file,
when they can simply use Outlook and attach
the file to a message. However, what if they
could use that same familiar Outlook interface
to access content in SharePoint? Read on and
let me show you how to do it.
Using the Right Versions
The first requirement for using Outlook and
SharePoint together is to ensure that you have
the right versions. Microsoft offers the following main flavors of SharePoint products:
- WSS 3.0 is the most recent core SharePoint
offering. It's built on ASP.NET 2.0 and free
for download and deployment on Windows
Server 2003.
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
2007 builds on WSS 3.0 and is the most
recent enterprise-grade SharePoint product.
It's suitable for large enterprises or external-facing deployments.
- WSS 2.0 is the previous SharePoint offering
and is built on ASP.NET 1.1. It's still available
as a free download for Windows 2003 and is
included in Windows 2003 R2.
- SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2.0 is the previous enterprise-grade SharePoint product;
it builds on WSS 2.0.
There are a few other variants of SharePoint,
but they're built on one of these four products.
The differences are negligible from an Outlook
user's point of view.
At a minimum, you need WSS 2.0 and Outlook 2003 to get the benefits of integration. To
get the best experience, you'll want WSS 3.0 and
Outlook 2007. You don't have to use MOSS 2007
or SPS 2.0; both WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0 will do the
job.
You don't need a specific version of Exchange
Server (or even use Exchange Server) to get Outlook and SharePoint working together. Outlook
doesn't use typical messaging protocols such
as Messaging API (MAPI) or SMTP to integrate
with SharePoint. SharePoint alerts are the one
exception to this rule: Alerts are email messages
generated by SharePoint, so you need a working
SMTP infrastructure.
Depending on which versions of software
you have in your environment, you might not
see the full benefits of integration. Table 1 shows
the interaction capabilities between different
SharePoint and Outlook versions. WSS 2.0 and
Outlook 2003 offer a degree of integration, but
most of it is one-way integration; Outlook pulls
the data from SharePoint, but any changes
made in Outlook aren't pushed back. Instead,
you must use your browser to update the
resource in SharePoint; the updated content is
then replicated back to Outlook. Although this
isn't ideal for many scenarios, it's good enough
for many teams and projects and gives users
the benefits of having ad hoc or team-based
repositories that they can view from Outlook.
Note that if you use Exchange 2007 Outlook
Web Access (OWA), your access to SharePoint data gets even better. You can configure Exchange 2007 OWA to proxy requests to
specified internal SharePoint servers, allowing
authorized users to reach content in SharePoint
repositories by clicking embedded links in
their messages, even when they're outside your
firewall. Unfortunately, this isn't true if you're
using Outlook. Although the Outlook Anywhere
feature in Exchange 2007 lets you connect
to Exchange from any Internet connection, it isn't a generic HTTP Secure
(HTTPS) proxy. If you're outside
your firewall and need Outlook
to access SharePoint data, either
your SharePoint servers must be
published externally or you need
some other solution such as a
VPN connection.
SharePoint Content Available
Within Outlook
The first thing you need to understand when
using Outlook and SharePoint together is how
SharePoint stores content. Although the SharePoint interface uses Web pages and sites, most
SharePoint content is in the form of lists—calendar events, contacts, documents, and the like.
The SharePoint interface is designed to help the
user get to those all-important lists. Starting with
WSS 2.0 and Office 2003, Microsoft provided
integration points to allow Office applications
such as Outlook to consume list content from
SharePoint without the HTML wrapper. Figure
1 shows a typical SharePoint document list seen
from the Web browser; Figure 2 shows the same
document list accessed from Outlook.
Let's take a closer look at the types of SharePoint content you can consume in Outlook, as
well as look at why you'd want to use SharePoint
instead of Exchange or some other messaging
system:
Document workspaces. Document workspaces are repositories for sharing documents.
SharePoint offers several desirable document
workspace features such as versioning and document check-in and check-out. Although many
people use Outlook and Exchange public folders
for ad hoc document management, public folders don't have the same features as SharePoint.
Don't underestimate the productivity boost of
knowing that you always have the most recent
version of a given document at your fingertips.
Outlook users can create shared attachments, which are stored in a dynamically created SharePoint document workspace as well as being sent
as a conventional attachment.
Meeting workspaces. Meeting workspaces,
such as the one that Web Figure 1 (http://
www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 96624)
shows, let you collect in one place all the typical
types of content that you might find in a meeting. Outlook users can easily provision a meeting workspace while setting up the meeting
invitation. Meeting workspaces offer features
such as an agenda list, an associated document library, a task list, and a decision list. All
invitees can access and update these, allowing
any participant in the meeting to update the
agenda or upload a relevant document without
having to manually send the changes out to all
participants.
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