Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

180 9.2 Word 2007

search folders are created for you in the SharePoint PST. One is called Offline

Documents and it aggregates all your documents from all your connected

libraries. One click and you have everything at your fingertips. The other

search folder is called SharePoint Drafts, and it comes into play when you

edit an Office document through its underlying application—such as when

double-clicking a synchronized document from within Outlook or taking

the Edit in Microsoft Word option from the drop-down menu while navigat-

ing a document library in a SharePoint site via your browser. So let’s look at

how Word 2007 deals with this.

As with lists, the lists Web service is used to receive a notification of the

documents that have changed; a straightforward GET on those documents is

then performed to pull them down into Outlook.

9.2 Word 2007

Word 2007, like other Office 2007 applications, is aware of SharePoint docu-

ment libraries and knows whether the document that is currently being

edited has any connection with a library. We say connection here because it is

possible to take offline copies of source documents, edit them offline, and

then copy them back to the library at a future point in time. Therefore, you

could be editing an offline copy or directly editing the server copy. There are

a couple of ways to create an offline copy, the first being through synchroniz-

ing the library with Outlook 2007. If you double-click such an item from

within Outlook, a read-only copy of the document is opened in Word and an

option is presented to you in the information panel for offline editing, as

shown in Figure 9.3. In this instance, Word knows that it is not directly

viewing the server copy and therefore offers you the option of offline editing.

If you click the Edit Offline button, a physical copy of the document is

made from your SharePoint PST to your local SharePoint Drafts folder. This

folder is created for you in your My Documents folder and is used to store

offline copies for all documents that you want to modify offline, regardless of

which SharePoint document library their source belongs in. Word itself

allows you to control the offline editing capability and the location for your

offline copies. Offline copies can also be placed here when you use the Check

Out functionality available on all SharePoint document libraries. Thus, every

item that finds its way into the SharePoint Drafts folder knows where it ini-

tially came from.

Figure 9.3

Offline editing

option.

9.2 Word 2007 181

Chapter 9

As you edit the offline copy, Word reminds you about the server copy

and permits you to copy your version back to the server or, indeed, to over-

write your local copy with the version from the server in case it has been

updated by someone else in the meantime. There are also options for merg-

ing changes with the server version. Outlook is also aware of those docu-

ments for which you have an offline copy. You will see a visual indication of

this in Outlook’s user interface, and Outlook will also present all your offline

copies through the SharePoint Drafts search folder (this is only for docu-

ments that have found their way to the SharePoint Drafts folder via Outlook

and not via any other mechanism).

Comparing versions

Word 2007 has the ability to compare documents and is aware of whether

the document you are editing has come from a version-enabled document

library. If so, you can quickly compare the current version to any previous

version of the document. This is done using the Compare section, which

appears on the Review section of the ribbon. You can also choose to compare

any two files by manually specifying their location. Combining the files

together is also possible. You can see this in action in Figure 9.4—the docu-

ment I am currently editing is in a version-enabled library and I saved a ver-

sion before I typed this sentence!

Figure 9.4

Comparing

versions of

documents.