SharePoint Tip of the Month

September 2010: 4 Great Points of Integration Between Windows 7, SharePoint 2010, and Office 2010

1) Open From and Save to SharePoint
Office 2010 provides several new integration points that allow users to interact with SharePoint while staying within the core Office products. The ability to check-in and check-out documents from the Office products was first introduced in Office 2007. Office 2010 builds upon this functionality in a few key ways.

“Send to SharePoint” and “Recent Locations” options (shown below) provide users with an intuitive interface to save documents to and open ones from the sites and libraries they most commonly access. Document libraries in SharePoint also have a button to “Add to SharePoint Sites.” Clicking on this button adds the library as an option to the Locations portion of the screen shown below.

2) Version Management
A strong selling point for SharePoint has always been the ability to retain older versions of the same document. Office 2010 builds on this capability by incorporating version management into the client applications.

Manage Versions options built into the core Office products allow users to easily access older versions of the same document without having to go into SharePoint. The 2010 version of Microsoft Word even has version comparison built in, allowing users to see specifically what changed from one version of a document to the next – a handy feature for when someone reviews your document but forgets to enable Track Changes.

3) Windows 7 Search Folders
Looking for content, but you don’t have SharePoint open? With Windows 7, you can create what are known as federated search folders. Starting on a SharePoint 2010 search results page, you can click on a link to add a SharePoint search folder to your set of Windows 7 favorites. Once that is in place, anytime you need to do a search of the same SharePoint site, you can start from Windows and enter your search term. A detailed results pane allows you to sort and filter results based on Name, Author, Date Modified, Size, Folder and search relevance ranking. Also, a preview web part allows you to quickly view the document to verify that it is the one you are looking for.

4) Social Connectors in Outlook 2010 Outlook 2010 has added Social Connectors to incorporate information about the people you correspond with. Social Connectors can pull from SharePoint My Sites, but they can also display information from LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networking sites. Once setup, Outlook includes a People Pane that shows details about the person you just received email from, such as their profile picture, status updates and recent activities. Not only does this help provide useful context and background information about the person you are corresponding with, it also helps put a face to the name, bringing disparately located people one step closer together. Additionally, with your social networking contacts, such as those you’ve connected with on LinkedIn, their contact information is included in an extra Outlook Contacts folder, allowing you to email them without having to log in to LinkedIn to look up their information.

This month’s tip contributed By Ben Nadler, Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Consultant.