Outlook and SharePoint: Playing Well Together

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

Although email is great for applicationssuch as integrated calendars and scheduling,it's not as good for uses like document and content management. Your Microsoft ExchangeServer administrators have a long list of reasonswhy sending large attachments through emailisn't the best way to share documents. However, few of them offer reasonable alternativesthat have low impact on your users' habits, andchanging users' work habits, especially whenthose changes reduce convenience, is difficult.Enter Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services(WSS).

SharePoint was designed as a collaborationplatform and therefore is a better medium forsharing content than any messaging system.However, one of its main flaws—and the biggest obstacle to getting organizations to deploySharePoint—is its Web-based interface. Usersdon't want to learn yet another interface formanaging their documents. It's inconvenientto pull up a Web browser and navigate to aspecific site just to upload or download a file,when they can simply use Outlook and attachthe file to a message. However, what if theycould use that same familiar Outlook interfaceto access content in SharePoint? Read on andlet me show you how to do it.

Using the Right Versions

The first requirement for using Outlook andSharePoint together is to ensure that you havethe right versions. Microsoft offers the following main flavors of SharePoint products:

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

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

You don't need a specific version of ExchangeServer (or even use Exchange Server) to get Outlook and SharePoint working together. Outlookdoesn't use typical messaging protocols suchas Messaging API (MAPI) or SMTP to integratewith SharePoint. SharePoint alerts are the oneexception to this rule: Alerts are email messagesgenerated by SharePoint, so you need a workingSMTP infrastructure.

Depending on which versions of softwareyou have in your environment, you might notsee the full benefits of integration. Table 1 showsthe interaction capabilities between differentSharePoint and Outlook versions. WSS 2.0 andOutlook 2003 offer a degree of integration, butmost of it is one-way integration; Outlook pullsthe data from SharePoint, but any changesmade in Outlook aren't pushed back. Instead,you must use your browser to update theresource in SharePoint; the updated content isthen replicated back to Outlook. Although thisisn't ideal for many scenarios, it's good enoughfor many teams and projects and gives usersthe benefits of having ad hoc or team-basedrepositories that they can view from Outlook.

Note that if you use Exchange 2007 OutlookWeb Access (OWA), your access to SharePoint data gets even better. You can configure Exchange 2007 OWA to proxy requests tospecified internal SharePoint servers, allowingauthorized users to reach content in SharePointrepositories by clicking embedded links intheir messages, even when they're outside yourfirewall. Unfortunately, this isn't true if you'reusing Outlook. Although the Outlook Anywherefeature in Exchange 2007 lets you connectto Exchange from any Internet connection, it isn't a generic HTTP Secure(HTTPS) proxy. If you're outsideyour firewall and need Outlookto access SharePoint data, eitheryour SharePoint servers must bepublished externally or you needsome other solution such as aVPN connection.

SharePoint Content AvailableWithin Outlook

The first thing you need to understand whenusing Outlook and SharePoint together is howSharePoint stores content. Although the SharePoint interface uses Web pages and sites, mostSharePoint content is in the form of lists—calendar events, contacts, documents, and the like.The SharePoint interface is designed to help theuser get to those all-important lists. Starting withWSS 2.0 and Office 2003, Microsoft providedintegration points to allow Office applicationssuch as Outlook to consume list content fromSharePoint without the HTML wrapper. Figure1 shows a typical SharePoint document list seenfrom the Web browser; Figure 2 shows the samedocument list accessed from Outlook.

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

Document workspaces. Document workspaces are repositories for sharing documents.SharePoint offers several desirable documentworkspace features such as versioning and document check-in and check-out. Although manypeople use Outlook and Exchange public foldersfor ad hoc document management, public folders don't have the same features as SharePoint.Don't underestimate the productivity boost ofknowing that you always have the most recentversion 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 sentas 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 typicaltypes of content that you might find in a meeting. Outlook users can easily provision a meeting workspace while setting up the meetinginvitation. Meeting workspaces offer featuressuch as an agenda list, an associated document library, a task list, and a decision list. Allinvitees can access and update these, allowingany participant in the meeting to update theagenda or upload a relevant document withouthaving to manually send the changes out to allparticipants.

Contacts. These are records that identifypeople with whom we interact. In SharePoint,contacts are typically shared by project or site;the contacts the IT team keeps will be differentfrom the contacts the HR department keeps.SharePoint contacts are directly analogous tothe Contact entries in Outlook and containmany of the same properties, as Figure 3 shows.By using a contact list in SharePoint, everyonewho has access to the list has a single place toupdate the contacts, instead of having to maintain and swap Contact objects. You could alsouse public folders to share contacts, but theneach recipient has to manually track the latestversions and update them.

Events. Events are records that describeappointments, meetings, or other calendardata. In SharePoint, calendar data is typicallyshared by project or site, providing a convenienttool for groups. Outlook users are familiar withcalendar data, so having shared calendars forspecific projects—and having those calendarsautomatically update—is a huge win.

Tasks. These are records that capture itemsthat you're responsible for accomplishing, alongwith their due date, as Web Figure 2 shows. BothSharePoint and Outlook offer support for creating and assigning tasks, but a SharePoint tasklist is immediately visible to all users without having to manually send out and update thetasks. Outlook will remind you of SharePointtasks that are due and show them in your calendar.

RSS feeds. These are XML files that describeWeb-based content without formatting. Theyprovide a way to subscribe to a content producer and regularly pull updates into the user'sclient of choice. Although you can modify WSS2.0 to provide RSS feeds, feeds are built intoWSS 3.0 and are natively available for mosttypes of lists. The ability to consume RSS feedsis a native feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer(IE) 7.0 and Outlook 2007. By leveraging thiscapability, you can consume practically anytype of data stored in SharePoint beyond thetypes already mentioned. Figure 4,shows an RSS feed in Outlook.

Synchronizing Content

There are no special steps that you need totake to get Outlook talking to SharePoint; allthe correct ActiveX controls are installed whenyou install Outlook. As you add SharePointresources to Outlook, Outlook must track thoseresources. Both versions of Outlook create aseparate PST file store on the local hard driveto hold the SharePoint content. Each separateSharePoint list is seen in Outlook as a uniquefolder within this new store. When new contentis posted to the linked SharePoint list, Outlookcopies it to the appropriate folder.

This synchronization design has severalimplications that you need to be aware of. First,whenever you launch Outlook, it automaticallyattempts to synchronize SharePoint resources.This is great when you have access to theSharePoint server because it allows you to viewthe latest version of your SharePoint resourceswhen you're offline without having to manually fuss with synchronization. The downsideis that if Outlook can't connect to your configured SharePoint resources, you'll see annoyingauthentication prompts and synchronizationerrors.

Because of this synchronization design, tokeep automatic synchronization working, youmust keep the folders in the SharePoint store.You can copy items out of these folders and intoregular folders, but if you move the linked folders, Outlook will lose the link to SharePoint andwill stop updating them. Likewise, any itemsthat you copy or move from these folders won'tbe updated in their new locations.

Finally, the SharePoint personal store isunique to both the Outlook profile you're usingand the computer you're running it on; if you use both a desktop and a laptop, you must addyour SharePoint resources to both instances ofOutlook.

Configuring Outlook

The process for using Outlook with SharePointis simple. The following steps outline the general procedures for accessing and working withdifferent types of content.

To access a SharePoint list:

To link an attachment in Outlook to a SharePoint Shared Workspace:

To link an Outlook meeting invitation with aSharePoint Meeting Workspace:

Pain Points

Integration between Outlook and SharePointisn't all roses. You need to keep in mind the following limitations:

Other Resources

There are numerous resources for learningabout SharePoint and Office. Many of them giveexcellent information on integrating SharePointwith Outlook and other Office applications.Here a few of the best ones:

The Office Online Web site (http://office.microsoft.com) is the first place to go for Officeguidance. It provides many useful resources forOffice users, including handy how-to guidancefor many tasks.

One of your best resources for any versionof Office is the appropriate Microsoft OfficeResource Kit. These resource kits can be foundonline at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork and contain a wealth of guidance to helpyou mange your Office applications and findways to make them work better together.Whether you're using WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007product, most of the guidance will apply toboth products.

The SharePoint team maintains a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint. It providesa fascinating and useful "behind the scenes"look at the SharePoint product. Many of theposts focus on administering SharePoint andusing SharePoint through the Web interface,but the blog is a great contact point not onlywith the SharePoint product team, but with theregular crowd of SharePoint enthusiasts whoparticipate through the comments.

Better Together

WSS is Microsoft's preferred collaboration platform for sharing and managing documentand list content. Although it's grown steadilymore useful with every version, offering greaterdegrees of interaction with the applications inthe Office suite, many users and administrators fail to take full advantage of its true powerbecause they find a Web-based interface to betoo cumbersome or disruptive.

Outlook is a popular productivity application that helps users manage not just messagingdata, but calendar and contact information aswell. With the integration points provided byMicrosoft, you can use SharePoint and Outlooktogether to fully leverage the strengths of eachproduct. This kind of interaction can overcomesome of the limitations of using the messaginginfrastructure (such as Exchange Server) as adocument dissemination and managementmedium, while still giving users a central interface for their daily information worker tasks.