Review: Workshare Point

There are many products on the market aimed at promoting Microsoft SharePoint adoption. They strive to better integrate SharePointfunctionality into Microsoft Outlook (and other Microsoft Office applications) by giving users everything they need to manage SharePoint documents withoutleaving Outlook. Workshare Point is one of those products. But does it have anything that's going to make it stand out from the crowd? That's what I wantedto find out when I tested it recently. (See also, "Bringing SharePoint to Outlook").

Installation and Setup

Workshare Point works with Office 2010 SP1 and Office 2007 SP3. It runs on Windows 7, Windows Vista SP2 or later, and Windows XP SP3 or later. On theserver side, Workshare Point supports SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, and Office 365.

You install Workshare Point using a Windows Installer (.msi) file, which you can distribute using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM),Group Policy, or a similar technology. Although the Workshare website states that Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is the only prerequisite, the product alsorequires the Microsoft Visual C++ libraries, Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime, and Office Primary Interop Assemblies. Fortunately, WorksharePoint checks for these prerequisites and will download and install them if they aren't present. Setting up Workshare Point is simple and only requires theURL of the SharePoint site that you want to work with.

Workshare Point includes a simple configuration manager application that you can use to control integration with Office suite applications. From within theconfiguration manager, you can perform some basic tasks, such as licensing, configuring UI options, and adding and removing SharePoint sites. You can alsouse the registry to add or remove SharePoint sites.

Outlook Integration

Outlook integration is enabled by default. Unlike most other SharePoint plug-ins for Outlook I've worked with, Workshare Point isn't relegated to just asidebar. As Figure 1 shows, it introduces several components:

Besides these components, a Workshare bar has been added to the new email message window in Outlook. One of the Workshare bar's options is the ability tofile the email in a specified SharePoint folder after it's sent. Workshare Point has a Pending Uploads folder, so if there's a connectivity issue, emailwill still be filed in the SharePoint destination folder. The Workshare bar also includes a search option.

You can drag and drop files from Windows Explorer to the Matter View pane in Outlook. You can also drag and drop files from the Workshare Point sidebar orMatter View pane to Outlook emails, either as a file or link. The default drag-and-drop behavior is to add a file to an email as an attachment. If you wantit inserted as a link instead, you press the Alt key while dragging the file. There's also the option to right-click a SharePoint document and add it to anew email message as an attachment or link. However, if you're selecting the option to add a SharePoint document as a link from the context menu on theWorkshare bar from inside a new email message window, Workshare Point will create a new email message -- a behavior that seems a little awkward because itdiffers from the behavior of the drag-and-drop method.

From time to time, Workshare Point loses connection to SharePoint. This is manifested in an inability to select a folder in the Workshare Point sidebar orempty folders in the Matter View pane. Server connection problems with the Workshare Point plug-in can also cause Outlook to freeze. This is the kind ofproblem that will drive users crazy, and quite rightly so. I also found Workshare Point's connection to SharePoint a little slower than competing products.

Integration with Other Office Applications

Workshare Point integrates with not only Outlook, but also Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. In these Office suite applications, Workshare Point adds Local Openand Local Save options to the File menu, which you use for opening and saving files on the local machine. Workshare Point also replaces the standard OfficeOpen and Save options with its own Open and Save options, which you use to open and save files in a SharePoint site. With this setup, you can easily workwith Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files both on the local machine and in SharePoint sites.

Not Quite as Good as the Competition

After using Workshare Point, I can say that it feels like a corporate in-house solution that's been let out into the wild. As such, it suffers from aproblem that applications created by in-house developers often have: a lack of usability. That's not to say that Workshare Point is unusable, but itdoesn't feel as polished or as well thought out as competing products. My advice would be to look at the competition first or wait for the next majorupdate if you want to use Workshare Point to take advantage of its integration with other Workshare products.