Pain Points
Integration between Outlook and SharePoint
isn't all roses. You need to keep in mind the following limitations:
- By default, WSS uses Integrated Windows
Authentication, where the browser passes
the credentials of your logged-in Windows
account to the SharePoint server. Outlook
can be used in a variety of situations that
don't allow integrated authentication, so
your users might need to enter their credentials to synchronize SharePoint content
when they first start up Outlook.
- You must address backup and restore of your
synchronized data because it's all kept in the
special PST file. This store isn't backed up
during the server-side backup processes on
your messaging server, so you need to include
it in the workstation-level backup processes
you use. (Your regular SharePoint backup
process takes care of the server-side data, so if
you do lose this store it's not lost forever.) You
also need to ensure that your Outlook profile
is backed up, which is not typically the case in
many Exchange environments.
- Synchronization between SharePoint and
Outlook doesn't always happen as quickly
as users would like. Although it's not a completely random process, SharePoint synchronization seems to happen as a background
task. As you're working in Outlook, it will
work through your configured SharePoint
resources one at a time and update them.
When you have a large number of updates, this can take a bit of time. If you're in a hurry
and need to ensure that your SharePoint
resources are fully updated, you can right-click the SharePoint store in Outlook and
select the synchronization option.
- As mentioned earlier, unless you're using
Outlook 2007 and WSS 3.0 together, any
updates you make to replicated content in
Outlook will need to be manually uploaded
to SharePoint. Although this means you can't
use Outlook as a complete replacement for
navigating SharePoint in your Web browser,
you can use it as an alternative for day-today tasks.
- The release version of Outlook 2007 has
some problems with slow performance
when the user's data store is larger than 1GB. Because one of the reasons people
are using Outlook and SharePoint together is to enable Outlook to handle the bulkier
document types without having them clog
up the messaging system, this problem can
be a pain point when using Outlook and
SharePoint together. The Microsoft article
"You may experience performance problems
when you are working with items in a large
.pst file or in a large .ost file in Outlook 2007"
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932086)
describes the problem and offers a hotfix to
resolve the problem.
Other Resources
There are numerous resources for learning
about SharePoint and Office. Many of them give
excellent information on integrating SharePoint
with 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 Office
guidance. It provides many useful resources for
Office users, including handy how-to guidance
for many tasks.
One of your best resources for any version
of Office is the appropriate Microsoft Office
Resource Kit. These resource kits can be found
online at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork and contain a wealth of guidance to help
you mange your Office applications and find
ways to make them work better together.
Whether you're using WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007
product, most of the guidance will apply to
both products.
The SharePoint team maintains a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint. It provides
a fascinating and useful "behind the scenes"
look at the SharePoint product. Many of the
posts focus on administering SharePoint and
using SharePoint through the Web interface,
but the blog is a great contact point not only
with the SharePoint product team, but with the
regular crowd of SharePoint enthusiasts who
participate through the comments.
Better Together
WSS is Microsoft's preferred collaboration platform for sharing and managing document
and list content. Although it's grown steadily
more useful with every version, offering greater
degrees of interaction with the applications in
the Office suite, many users and administrators fail to take full advantage of its true power
because they find a Web-based interface to be
too cumbersome or disruptive.
Outlook is a popular productivity application that helps users manage not just messaging
data, but calendar and contact information as
well. With the integration points provided by
Microsoft, you can use SharePoint and Outlook
together to fully leverage the strengths of each
product. This kind of interaction can overcome
some of the limitations of using the messaging
infrastructure (such as Exchange Server) as a
document dissemination and management
medium, while still giving users a central interface for their daily information worker tasks.
End of Article
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