Microsoft Outlook has been much more than an email client for many years. It gives us the ability to manage our email, tasks, contacts and calendars. With the release of Sharepoint 2003 it started to become and interface into Sharepoint, but the functionality was limited. With the release of Office 2007 and Sharepoint 2007 it evolved to the next level.

In this blog I am going to illustrate the integration points between Sharepoint and Outlook 2007. I will create a quick list as a reference point:

• Alerts - email notifications received from Sharepoint
• Document Library - keep an offline copy of documents in Sharepoint
• Tasks - share tasks between members of a site instead of just with yourself.
• Calendar - share calendars between staff, like boardrooms
• Contacts - have shared contacts between members instead of only private contacts. 
• RSS Feeds - subscribe to blogs posted on Sharepoint to get all the updates.

The process starts by creating a site in Sharepoint and then creating a number of web parts by selecting "Create" from the "Site Actions" menu.

Create one of each of the following web parts:

• Document Library
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Tasks

You can also create a Blog site to test the RSS feeds.

Document Library

Navigate to the document library and select the "Actions" menu option.

On this menu there is an option called "Connect to Outlook" that will link the document library to outlook. This is exactly the same procedure to follow with all the other web parts like tasks, calendar and contacts.

Once this option is selected, it will launch Outlook 2007 and pop-up the following dialogue box.

Once you select "Yes", the document library will be linked to outlook and all the documents will be synchronized to create an offline copy in your OST or PST file.

This feature allows you to work on your documents offline whilst away from the office. When you return to the office and download your email, the documents will automatically synchronise with the Sharepoint document library.

I have found that people in JHB love this as they can now go and work on weekends. For some reason this features evokes no response in CPT and DBN, maybe someone can explain this to me.

Calendar

The concept of sharing our calendars is not a new one, but in my experience it doesn't work for the following reasons:

• We create this shared calendar called "Board Room" maintained by someone and then we expect people to send emails to this person to book the resource. There are a number of reasons this does not work: People forget to email, their dates are double booked as they do not confirm, the email "Mysteriously" disappears.
• The setup of the Shared Calendar is manual and people do not know how to do this.
• There are sync errors on a regular basis as people use the calendars in their outlook PST files and not the Exchange mailbox calendar.

Fortunately this problem is now solved using the shared calendar in Sharepoint. It is a simple matter of creating the calendar in a Sharepoint site and then linking it to outlook as explained earlier in this blog.

The new calendar will now appear next to your own private calendar in outlook. The integration between the outlook calendar and Sharepoint is bi-directional, meaning that you can schedule meetings from here. These meetings will then automatically cascade into all the other people's outlook via their link to the same calendar in Sharepoint.

By selecting the checkboxes on the left of the screen in outlook, you can remove the calendar of your choice from the display area. The calendars can also be overlayed so that any double bookings can immediately be noticed, look closely at the screen shot for the tool tip.

Tasks

Tasks has always been a popular feature for organising you own personal and work life, but it falls far short of expectation were team collaboration is concerned. Lets think about how we typically work everyday:

• You remember to do something and you add a task. If you never get round to it you deleted it. Who will know?
• If you are an advanced user, you will right drag a new mail onto the task pane, thereby creating a new task with the attachments. Yea Right!!!
• If we need to tell someone else to do something we send them a mail so that they can add it to their tasks manually. What mail?
• When a task is overdue and flashing in red, change the date, no one will know. What accountability?

You can either agree or disagree about tasks and how they work in you organization, but you would have to agree that there are some problems with tasks in outlook in stand-alone mode.

To collaborate properly, we need a central task list that is automatically updated and transparent to everyone! Create a new task list in a Sharepoint site and link it to outlook as explained earlier in this blog.

Once again the task list is bi-directional. Therefore tasks can either be added from the web interface or directly from outlook. All the members of the site appear in a column called "Assigned To" and now tasks can be allocated to anyone without having to send an email. This creates complete transparency and now no one can hide from their work! Filters can also be created to focus on specific users or dates. Tasks can also be re-assigned and then email notifications are automatically generated.

Contacts

Contacts is a great way of keeping track of people and how to contact them. We sync it with our mobile phones and PDA's and pretty much schedule our meeting invites , task allocations and many other things around it. The question is, how up to date is your contact list details?

• When one of your contacts changes their details. How do you know about it?
• Many of you colleagues have the same contacts in their outlook. If they change the details, you will not be informed.
• We have tried to solving the problem by adding contacts onto the Exchange Global Address list. This does not work as it needs to be maintained by the IT department.
• Do you still email that company phone extension list as a spreadsheet or do you pay expensive web developers to maintain the "Intranet".

There is a better way to do it using shared contact lists in Sharepoint linked to outlook. Create a contact list in a Sharepoint site and link it to outlook as explained earlier in this blog.

Once again the connection between Outlook and Sharepoint is bi-directional. Any contacts added is automatically updated in Sharepoint and then cascades to everyone else connected to this list. Therefore any changes made to contact details is shared among everyone in the office without having to notify any one. It then becomes a simple matter of syncing your phone and away you go.

RSS Feeds

The word RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and for the layman this still means nothing, so I will explain the concept to you. In short, it is a way for your PC to be notified if something on a web site has changed without you having to go and look for yourself.

A lot of us have our favourites in IE and we go and visit certain web sites every day, like this one (it better be on your favourites). Quite often we navigate to the web site to find that nothing has changed and waste quite a lot of time and bandwidth doing so. Wouldn't it be nice if your PC can be informed by the web site that something has changed and give you a brief description of what has changed.

In the case of Sharepoint, this can be done to Blog and Wiki sites. The steps to set up a RSS feed is quite simple:

1. Navigate to a Web site that offers an RSS Feed with the following icon
2. Click on the icon to create a subscription to the site.
3. Your PC will then be scanned for your default RSS Reader that could be Outlook.

As new posts are made to the web site, your RSS reader will automatically be updated assuming that you are connected to the Internet or Sharepoint. To read the entire article, select the link called "View Article" and you will be taken to the web site.

Alerts

Sharepoint can generate a lot of email from various locations, it all depends on what features have been enabled. Here is a list of some of the features that Sharepoint uses to generate emails:

• Adding a new user to a site
• Allocating a task to a user
• Sending and email to a document library for archiving.
• Setting up Alerts on Documents and Lists.

All the emails generated by Sharepoint end up in your inbox as email. If you analyse the emails, you will find that they all contain hyperlinks regarding the topic at hand that will open the correct page in Sharepoint when selected.

I hope this blog has illustrated the importance of Outlook 2007 to a Sharepoint deployment.

Related Office 2007 Blogs:

Building a KPI List using Excel in Sharepoint

Publishing PowerPoint slides to Sharepoint

Creating a Pivot Table in Sharepoint

Publishing a Blog from Word 2007 into Sharepoint

The importance of Outlook 2007 as a user interface into Sharepoint

Migrating an Access 2007 Database to Sharepoint