In the Marketing Communications library, click Actions and choose Connect to
Outlook. The document library will appear
in your Outlook folder hierarchy and will be
synchronized based on your Send/Receive
settings. Figure 6 shows the uploaded
brochure within Outlook—Outlook made it
available offline automatically.
Experience 7: Slide Libraries
Give this experience a try if you have
access to PowerPoint 2007. From the
Communications home page, select Site
Actions, Create. This time, choose Slide
Library and give the library a name. I chose
"WINDOMAIN.com slides," but it would be
wiser to keep names restricted to alphanumeric characters and spaces because
SharePoint Server deletes periods.
In PowerPoint, create a presentation
with several slides and save it. Then, in the slide library, click Upload and choose
Publish Slides (you can also publish from
the Office menu in PowerPoint). You'll be
asked which presentation to publish, and
you'll be given the chance to select specific
slides. When you're done, refresh the slide library, select one or more slides, then click Copy Slide to Presentation. SharePoint
launches PowerPoint and creates a presentation with the selected slides.
Can you imagine how happy your communications team will be to create "standard" slides that can be reused, instead of
reinvented, and can be managed (updated
and deleted) centrally? This might be the
best thing to ever happen to PowerPoint.
My clients' dreams of consistent communications might actually begin to come true.
Experience SharePoint
Many of my clients are IT organizations
that need to know what "low-hanging fruit"
can be picked with SharePoint Server. I
hope the experiences I've led you through
so far will give you something to show
your management or other stakeholders in your organization and will give you
the confidence and interest to approach
SharePoint Server yourself and get acclimated to its capabilities.