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the Free CMSWire NewsletterAn underutilized approach to encourage user adoption and enhance the collaboration experience in SharePoint 2010 is by using the Microsoft Office suite for creation and distribution of content. The integrated nature of the Office suite and SharePoint 2010 offers a familiar, alternative interface to a new platform that can be leveraged in many ways.
Establishing a successful enterprise collaboration strategy involves many factors. Governance, training, business engagement, careful planning and user adoption strategies are critical to ensuring a successful result.
With many organizations choosing SharePoint 2010 as an enterprise collaboration platform, one frequently encountered issue in a successful implementation is that of user adoption. For many users, the shift from traditional file shares and email to the online capabilities that SharePoint offers poses a huge hurdle.
The majority of organizations use the Microsoft Office suite for creation and distribution of content. This article will outline some of the various integration points between SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. By using the integration features between the two toolsets, not only is the barrier of entry to collaboration lowered for many users, but many advanced users can also benefit from the productivity savings that can arise.
Word 2010
By far the most popular tool in the Office suite, Word has a number of new features that can be leveraged in a collaborative setting. The new ability to co-author content allows for multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously (a capability also available in One Note, PowerPoint and Excel Web Access).
The ability to edit metadata more easily through the new backstage view, trigger workflows and the improved capabilities in the saving of content back into SharePoint 2010 allows users to become more efficient.
From an administrative perspective, the ability to push out Office save locations into the Office client through SharePoint 2010 further enhances integration scenarios. Additionally, allowing users to consume SharePoint content types from the Word client allows users to create, edit and save predefined templates stored on the SharePoint platform without the need to open up a web browser.
Outlook 2010
Improved capabilities in the viewing of lists, libraries and calendar integration enhance the collaboration experience. The new Outlook social connector helps users fill out their social profile in SharePoint 2010 by suggesting colleagues and keywords while allowing organizations to manage users in disparate social networks.
External data can be consumed within the Outlook client through the use of the new Business Connectivity Services capabilities. Users can now use the Outlook client to interact with data stored within the platform, as well as external data defined on SharePoint, through the one interface.
Excel 2010
Improvements in the publishing of content using Excel Web Access through the Excel 2010 client provides significant time savings. Once again, the majority of integration capabilities are available, such as metadata, workflows and backstage integration.
OneNote 2010
OneNote provides a tool that allows users to collaborate within the client using SharePoint 2010 as a storage mechanism. Frequently cited by many organizations is the ease of use that OneNote provides and can be the first step in an organizational-wide knowledge management initiative where OneNote is effectively used as a wiki tool.
Simultaneous editing, voice records, tagging and search capabilities can be successfully leveraged in a collaboration scenario in place of a SharePoint wiki in many situations. Another significant advantage is the ability to work with OneNote content offline and then synchronize changes back to the server.
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