Essential SharePoint

Chapter 4. Sharing Contacts and Meetings with Outlook

Outlook can use SharePoint two main ways:

• Sharing address book entries with team members through contacts lists

• Automatically creating workspaces for meetings requested from the Outlook Calendar

This chapter discusses these tasks from a user's perspective. If you are an administrator, you can use this chapter to help educate Outlook users on use of the new SharePoint features with Outlook.

Sharing Contacts

Outlook provides a set of tools for viewing and maintaining the list of contacts in your address book. If your company uses Exchange Server, you may already use a public list of contacts from Outlook to contact members of your organization. SharePoint provides another way to share contacts from your address book with others. Rather than providing a single public list containing everyone's information, SharePoint is focused more on team-based or project-based lists of contacts.

For example, a Team Site might include team members in the contacts list. Later, as new members join and lines of communication are established across groups, the contacts list grows. In this case, the contacts list is a way to share the collected knowledge of who the key people are and how to get a hold of them.

For a project site or a document workspace, the contacts list obviously includes everyone with responsibilities on the project. Outside resources, such as salespeople or customers, can be added as they become available. Of course, you can also use SharePoint ...