Beginning SharePoint® 2010 Administration™: Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010 and Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010

Chapter 3. Office Integration

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding Lists and Libraries

• Using Version History

• The Problem with Traditional File Systems

• Managing Custom Columns, Tags, and Metadata

• Datasheet Views and List Views

• Managing Site Columns and Content Types

• Understanding Information Policies

• Enabling Document ID

• Managing In-Place Records and Document Sets

In Chapter 2, you learned how easy the process is for a user to create sites for collaboration and blogs, without assistance from a developer or administrator. You also learned that SharePoint stores all information in different types of lists, depending on what type of information it is. The real magic in SharePoint shows up when you integrate other applications with these lists — for example, to read and write documents in a document library.

Multiple products from different vendors can use SharePoint's document libraries directly for storing files and documents, but one product family really shines when it comes to SharePoint integration: Microsoft Office — that is, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and so on. Other Microsoft applications also have excellent integration with SharePoint, especially Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft InfoPath. In fact, one can safely say that today, finding any program from Microsoft that does not have some sort of integration with SharePoint 2010 is hard.

This chapter describes how this integration works, and what differs between the current Microsoft ...