Integrating Deeply with Microsoft Office Applications

Digging deeper into the concepts of collaboration and document management, SharePoint 2010 provides the highest level of integration with Office 2010 products but supports users of Office 2007 and to some extent Office 2003 applications. The integration is most extensive with Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, PowerPoint, Visio, and tools essentially designed for using with SharePoint 2010: SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Workspace 2010. This integration serves as the cornerstone for the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint 2010. Chapter 25, “Using Office 2010 Applications with SharePoint 2010,” digs deeper into the topic of Office integration, as does Chapter 26, “Extending SharePoint 2010 with Excel Services, Access Services, and Visio Graphics Services.”

An example of enhanced collaboration that many organizations are seeking is to reduce reliance on email as a primary collaboration tool. SharePoint offers an ideal solution because it enables users to simply email a URL that is a link to a SharePoint document in a document library instead of emailing the entire document. Then users can access the document in the document library, programmatically check out the document, make changes, and check the document back in. SharePoint can create a new version of the document to allow for access to the historical versions of the document. And the end result is one document title and one URL for the document, as opposed to the “old way of doing things” in which users had to try to locate the document on a file share or in a public folder, and then locate the proper document while trying to figure out why “ABC Proposal v1.0csmn.docx” was newer than “ABC Proposal v2.0mncs.docx.”