Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 17

Integrating Office Clients with SharePoint

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 share in common
• Integrating the various Office clients
• Managing Office 2013 through Group Policy

Although technologies like SkyDrive and other cloud-sharing systems are being used by an increasing number of organizations, some workers are still sending documents over e-mail. Even though it is better than using “sneakernet,” this practice still creates confusion. With multiple versions of a document floating around, who has the latest version? Who is working on the document? Who made changes? Sending documents this way also causes wasted space on e-mail servers. Consider the cumulative effect of a few people sending a document back and forth four or five times. That is a significant amount of wasted space and efficiency. Compare all that effort to having one, version-controlled copy of the file that anyone can edit and easily track, in one place, and the answer is clear. SharePoint integration with Office can save you time and money.

One of the biggest advantages that SharePoint has over any other collaboration platform is its integration with Microsoft Office; and as long as Office reigns supreme over the information worker’s desktop, SharePoint will be king of the collaboration platforms. Interestingly, although most users know that this integration exists, very few can identify exact integration points or take the time to explore the depths of this integration. ...