Beginning SharePoint® 2007 Administration: Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Chapter 7. Office Integration

SharePoint 2007 is a great tool in itself; you can use it straight out of the box to build sites for an intranet, an extranet, public Internet sites, and team sites. It will help users find the information they need, quickly and easily. But the real magic comes when you integrate other products with SharePoint! There are lots of products that can use SharePoint's document libraries directly for storing files and documents, but one product family really shines when it comes to SharePoint integration: MS Office, which most people associate with the typical desktop applications (MS Word, MS Excel, and so on). There are also a lot of other programs that have an excellent integration with SharePoint, especially MS Outlook, MS OneNote, and MS InfoPath. In fact, today it is hard to find any program from Microsoft that does not have some sort of integration with SharePoint 2007; it is safe to say that SharePoint is the central information database in a Microsoft-centric IT environment.

This chapter will tell you how this integration works, and what differentiates previous versions of MS Office from the current MS Office 2007 release. You will find a lot of examples and step-by-step instructions on how to use a number of applications together with SharePoint 2007. All of this information is valid for both WSS and MOSS, unless stated otherwise.

NOTE

Entire books are devoted to each MS Office component, and more books are devoted to their integration. This chapter ...