Outlook and SharePoint: Playing Well Together

Microsoft Outlook has long been the center of Microsoft's collaborative user experience. Information workers rely on integrated messaging and calendaring to help manage their daily tasks. The result is that most users open Outlook first thing in the morning and shut it down only at the end of the day.

Although email is great for applications such as integrated calendars and scheduling, it's not as good for uses like document and content management. Your Microsoft Exchange Server administrators have a long list of reasons why sending large attachments through email isn't the best way to share documents. However, few of them offer reasonable alternatives that have low impact on your users' habits, and changing users' work habits, especially when those changes reduce convenience, is difficult. Enter Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

SharePoint was designed as a collaboration platform and therefore is a better medium for sharing content than any messaging system. However, one of its main flaws—and the biggest obstacle to getting organizations to deploy SharePoint—is its Web-based interface. Users don't want to learn yet another interface for managing their documents. It's inconvenient to pull up a Web browser and navigate to a specific site just to upload or download a file, when they can simply use Outlook and attach the file to a message. However, what if they could use that same familiar Outlook interface to access content in SharePoint? Read on and let me show you how to do it.

Using the Right Versions
The first requirement for using Outlook and SharePoint together is to ensure that you have the right versions. Microsoft offers the following main flavors of SharePoint products:

• WSS 3.0 is the most recent core SharePoint offering. It's built on ASP.NET 2.0 and free for download and deployment on Windows Server 2003.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 builds on WSS 3.0 and is the most recent enterprise-grade SharePoint product. It's suitable for large enterprises or external-facing deployments.
• WSS 2.0 is the previous SharePoint offering and is built on ASP.NET 1.1. It's still available as a free download for Windows 2003 and is included in Windows 2003 R2.
• SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2.0 is the previous enterprise-grade SharePoint product; it builds on WSS 2.0.

There are a few other variants of SharePoint, but they're built on one of these four products. The differences are negligible from an Outlook user's point of view.

At a minimum, you need WSS 2.0 and Outlook 2003 to get the benefits of integration. To get the best experience, you'll want WSS 3.0 and Outlook 2007. You don't have to use MOSS 2007 or SPS 2.0; both WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0 will do the job.

You don't need a specific version of Exchange Server (or even use Exchange Server) to get Outlook and SharePoint working together. Outlook doesn't use typical messaging protocols such as Messaging API (MAPI) or SMTP to integrate with SharePoint. SharePoint alerts are the one exception to this rule: Alerts are email messages generated by SharePoint, so you need a working SMTP infrastructure.

Depending on which versions of software you have in your environment, you might not see the full benefits of integration. Table 1 shows the interaction capabilities between different SharePoint and Outlook versions. WSS 2.0 and Outlook 2003 offer a degree of integration, but most of it is one-way integration; Outlook pulls the data from SharePoint, but any changes made in Outlook aren't pushed back. Instead, you must use your browser to update the resource in SharePoint; the updated content is then replicated back to Outlook. Although this isn't ideal for many scenarios, it's good enough for many teams and projects and gives users the benefits of having ad hoc or team-based repositories that they can view from Outlook.

Note that if you use Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access (OWA), your access to SharePoint data gets even better. You can configure Exchange 2007 OWA to proxy requests to specified internal SharePoint servers, allowing authorized users to reach content in SharePoint repositories by clicking embedded links in their messages, even when they're outside your firewall. Unfortunately, this isn't true if you're using Outlook. Although the Outlook Anywhere feature in Exchange 2007 lets you connect to Exchange from any Internet connection, it isn't a generic HTTP Secure (HTTPS) proxy. If you're outside your firewall and need Outlook to access SharePoint data, either your SharePoint servers must be published externally or you need some other solution such as a VPN connection.

SharePoint Content Available Within Outlook
The first thing you need to understand when using Outlook and SharePoint together is how SharePoint stores content. Although the SharePoint interface uses Web pages and sites, most SharePoint content is in the form of lists—calendar events, contacts, documents, and the like. The SharePoint interface is designed to help the user get to those all-important lists. Starting with WSS 2.0 and Office 2003, Microsoft provided integration points to allow Office applications such as Outlook to consume list content from SharePoint without the HTML wrapper. Figure 1 shows a typical SharePoint document list seen from the Web browser; Figure 2 shows the same document list accessed from Outlook.

Let's take a closer look at the types of SharePoint content you can consume in Outlook, as well as look at why you'd want to use SharePoint instead of Exchange or some other messaging system:

Document workspaces. Document workspaces are repositories for sharing documents. SharePoint offers several desirable document workspace features such as versioning and document check-in and check-out. Although many people use Outlook and Exchange public folders for ad hoc document management, public folders don't have the same features as SharePoint. Don't underestimate the productivity boost of knowing that you always have the most recent version of a given document at your fingertips. Outlook users can create shared attachments, which are stored in a dynamically created SharePoint document workspace as well as being sent as a conventional attachment.

Meeting workspaces. Meeting workspaces, such as the one that Web Figure 1 (http:// www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 96624) shows, let you collect in one place all the typical types of content that you might find in a meeting. Outlook users can easily provision a meeting workspace while setting up the meeting invitation. Meeting workspaces offer features such as an agenda list, an associated document library, a task list, and a decision list. All invitees can access and update these, allowing any participant in the meeting to update the agenda or upload a relevant document without having to manually send the changes out to all participants.