If you are currently using Office 2000 ("fair"), Office XP ("good'), or 2003 ("better") against Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and you upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007, your experience from Office 2000, Office XP or 2003 won’t change. You’ll have the same amount of integration with the new version of SharePoint technologies -- no more, no less.
If you upgrade the client applications to the Office 2007 products ("best"), here are the additional end-user benefits realized as compared to Office 2003 products when interfacing with SharePoint 2007 technologies. For more information on Office 2000/XP/2003 integrated features, see the existing "Good, Better, Best" whitepaper.
Note: These are not all the benefits of Office 2007 products over their 2003 counterparts, these are just the SharePoint 2007 integration benefits.
- Ability to take SharePoint content offline: document libraries, contacts, calendars, and tasks
- Ability to overlay SharePoint calendars with other calendars (people, resources, etc.) and fully edit the calendar in Outlook, including offline
- Ability to send an HTML email version of a SharePoint calendar to anyone, including outside the organization
- Ability to send InfoPath electronic forms via Outlook as an email. Results can be stored in SharePoint. Drops-downs can also be fed from SharePoint.
- Ability to have tasks from OneNote, SharePoint, and Project Server consolidate inside of Outlook
- Ability to approve tasks/workflows right from Outlook without having to open SharePoint or the Office content
- Records management for email messages (assuming Exchange 2007 is installed) and the ability to integrate those emails with SharePoint’s record management capabilities
- RSS reader – all SharePoint content is available via RSS feeds, Outlook 2007 has an integrated RSS reader
- From SharePoint, people can now e-mail a link directly to a document/file. When the user clicks on the link, the document will open in read mode and a button will appear telling the user they can edit it or check it out to make changes. This allows sending a link for both read and edit purposes.
- Enterprise Content Management
- Ability to complete meta-data in the Information Property Panel
- Ability to create custom Information Property Panels with business logic using InfoPath
- In-client workflows (initiate, complete, etc.)
- Ability to see a document requires workflow actions (approve, sign, etc.)
- Ability to see a document is locked and requires check-out to be modified
- Ability to see relevant corporate policies right in Office
- Rich Document signature workflow process
- Ability to author and publish web content
- When opening a Word 2007 document from SharePoint 2007…
- ability to see all previous published and draft versions
- ability to restore back to any previous version
- ability to perform a graphical comparison between any two versions
- Ability to create a new Blog posting or Wiki in SharePoint right from Word
- Barcodes and meta-data labels when printing content
- Publish spreadsheets to Excel Services
- web-based spreadsheet access
- web-services interface to the spreadsheets
- Enterprise Content Management
- Ability to complete meta-data in the Information Property Panel
- Ability to create custom Information Property Panels with business logic using InfoPath
- In-client workflows (initiate, complete, etc.)
- Ability to see a document requires workflow actions (approve, sign, etc.)
- Ability to see a document is locked and requires check-out to be modified
- Ability to see relevant corporate policies right in Office
- Rich Document signature workflow process
- PowerPoint slide libraries
- Enterprise Content Management
- Ability to complete meta-data in the Information Property Panel
- Ability to create custom Information Property Panels with business logic using InfoPath
- In-client workflows (initiate, complete, etc.)
- Ability to see a document requires workflow actions (approve, sign, etc.)
- Ability to see a document is locked and requires check-out to be modified
- Ability to see relevant corporate policies right in Office
- Rich Document signature workflow process
- Ability to publish forms to SharePoint Forms Services. This enables the InfoPath forms to be accessed from Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Netscape, or mobile devices.
- Ability to send InfoPath forms as emails to Outlook 2007 users. Results can be stored in SharePoint. Drops-downs can also be fed from SharePoint.
- Ability to publish rich reports using formats like PDF/XPS from SharePoint lists
- Ability to centralize the data storage to SharePoint lists
- Ability to take work offline
- Ability to synchronize SharePoint document libraries to Groove Workspaces for secure collaboration whether on-line or offline. This enables easy collaboration with customers, suppliers, or partners which aren’t part of your network or don’t have access to your SharePoint servers. Also enables at least 192 bit encryption of all content in Groove workspaces.
- Ability to create shared notebooks hosted/saved on a SharePoint site.
- Project Web Access is implemented via SharePoint, thus all features apply – like take document libraries offline in Outlook
- Project Lite – users can create Project task lists in SharePoint and then promote them to Project Professional and make them full-blown projects
- Reporting – Project will provide what we’re calling the “Reporting Center” which allows for customized Excel and Visio templates which can automatically populate based on back-end data.
- Workflow – we now can have routing and approval of project- and resource-related information