Office and SharePoint; Better Together - Part 1: Document Workspaces

SharePoint is an amazing product - it acts as a collaboration, portal, search, content management and business intelligence tool. However, as with most Microsoft technologies., SharePoint's capability and functionality is significantly increased when it is integrated with other technologies in the Microsoft stack.

By combining the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007, companies can provide their employees with a feature-rich yet familiar user interface. Users can interact and edit documents stored on SharePoint Server from directly within the Office clients, without needing to open a web browser. Ultimately this means new SharePoint users can make use of advanced SharePoint collaboration and document management tools directly from programs they are already comfortable with, while advanced SharePoint users can choose to interact with documents and SharePoint site either directly from SharePoint or from the Office suite.

In this series of blog posts, I will be highlighting some of the integration between Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading the Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper, available from microsoft.com/downloads.

The first aspect of integration featured is the ability to create and modify document workspaces directly from within Word 2007.