Collaboration on the Go: Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and the Mobile Workplace1

Collaboration on the Go: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the Mobile Workplace1

Collaboration on the Go:

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0and the Mobile Workplace

Article

Published: January 2007

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Collaboration on the Go: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the Mobile Workplace1

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Introduction

In today’s new world of work, people and teams are dispersed across the globe and always on the go. For organizations of all sizes to maintain a competitive advantage, workers need tools that support collaboration, no matter where they are located—in an office cubicle, in a conference room, in an airport, or at a café. Better collaboration has been shown to have a positive impact on a business’s profitability, customer and employee satisfaction, product quality, and innovation.

Designed to improve team collaboration and productivity, Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services is all about the collaborative workspace. In addition to many other new features, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 delivers features and enhancements for information sharing that enable teams to take workspace-based collaboration on the road. Now, your mobile workforce can remain productive, informed, and on-task away from the office—without access to a computer and even while working offline.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workspaces are Web-based team sites that are accessible through a browser on a desktop or portable computer, and now, with support for mobile devices, from Web-enabled mobile phones, smart phones, or Pocket PCs. Workspaces connect people and information within your organization, and they connect your organization with external partners, suppliers, and customers to help people easily share ideas and information. And the best part is that you don’t need any expertise in designing or building Web sites to get started.

This article introduces some of the new features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that provide added flexibility, enabling teams to take full advantage of workspace-based collaboration—even on the go.

In this article:

• What Is Windows SharePoint Services?
• Creative Forums for Collaboration Anywhere, Anytime
• Microsoft Office Away from the Office
• A Workspace for Every Need

What Is Windows SharePoint Services?

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology of the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system that enables teams to create collaborative Web-based workspaces for sharing ideas and information. Within these workspaces, teams can store and manage shared calendars, contacts, tasks, documents, and more. With Windows SharePoint Services, users have the ability to create workspaces themselves, and to publish, store, share, and keep track of information and documents—without involving IT support. At the same time, Windows SharePoint Services gives your company’s IT department a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment.

With many out-of-the-box capabilities, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is also a highly extensible foundation for creating Web-based tools, services, and business applications. Through integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 enables you to more easily expand your collaboration environment for enhanced records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more. Additionally, integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 helps you more easily customize new SharePoint sites and build tools for specific business processes without writing new code.

Creative Forums for Collaboration Anywhere, Anytime

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 offers several new features for idea-sharing and brainstorming that promote informal collaboration—perfect for when teams are on the move and can’t meet face-to-face. Many of these features are now available on mobile devices because Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 enables users to view team workspaces from Web-enabled mobile phones, smart phones, and Pocket PCs.[i]

Mobile Access to Your Work

With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, team workspaces can be accessed through the browser on your smart phone, Pocket PC, or Web-enabled mobile phone so that you can stay productive anywhere, anytime. Using a special URL (the URL of the team site with an “m” added to the end: ) gives you access to a simplified, text-only version of your workspace.[ii]

Once connected to the team workspace fromyour mobile device, you can view and update shared content including tasks, calendar entries, and contacts. You can also download, view, and edit Microsoft Office files, such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint®presentations, Microsoft Office Word documents, and Microsoft Office Excel®spreadsheets on your mobile device.[iii]

From the mobile view, sending e-mail messages from your mobile device to contacts stored in the workspace is easy: E-mail addresses show up as clickable hyperlinks. All you have to do is click the link on your mobile device to generate an e-mail message. Similarly, phone numbers of contacts found in the workspace also show up as hyperlinks, and when clicked the phone number will automatically dial.[iv]

Blogs

Teams can participate in blogs to discuss ideas. Used like a journal or diary, blogs can be a great vehicle for keeping team members up-to-date and informed about your daily activities or interactions with customers or partners. The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 blog template allows the blog owner to post entries to the site, and visitors to the site can comment on individual posts as well as subscribe to a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed to automatically receive regular blog updates in their Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 Inbox or other RSS reader.

Figure 2: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 blog template.

Blog to SharePoint Sites from Your Mobile Device

With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you can post to workspace blogs from your mobile device. You can also take digital photos using phones with built-in cameras and send a photo embedded in the body of an e-mail message from the phone to the workspace blog. The photo will appear on the blog site as a new entry and will also appear on the mobile view of the workspace as a hyperlink to the actual photo file. Photo-blogging is of course fun and dynamic, and it can also be very useful in a business setting. For example, a team member may be at an industry trade show and want to show colleagues an image of a new product design. The photo-blogging feature enables users to add visuals to their day-to-day mobile communications.

Post to Community Forums Using E-Mail

For more flexibility in contributing to blogs and other Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 community forums, such as discussion boards, calendars, or document libraries, you can post content by sending a simple e-mail message from your portable computer or mobile device to the e-mail address associated with that SharePoint list. You don’t even need to connect to your team site—just compose the message using a preconfigured template and the message or content will be available to others who have access tothe workspace. Or, if you are working without an Internet connection using the Office Outlook 2007 or a third-party e-mail client, you can compose the message offline; when you reestablish an Internet connection, the message will be delivered and your posting will be complete.

For users of smart phones, Pocket PCs, Windows Mobile® powered Pocket PCs, or e-mail capable mobile phones, contributing ideas to community forums using the e-mail capabilities of your mobile device is a convenient alternative when you’re on the go, without an Internet connection, or away from your computer, and when you need to communicate an urgent message to the entire team. With support for third-party e-mail handlers, this feature extends to other e-mail programs besides Microsoft Office Outlook.

Alerts on the Go

For mobile workers who aren’t able to connect to the team site regularly, alerts are an efficient way to stay informed of changes made to the workspace. You can receive alerts on your Web-enabled or e-mail-capable mobile phone, smart phone, or Pocket PC. Through customizable e-mail alerts, notifications, and RSS feeds, team members are automatically informed of changes to workspace content or to new or changed task assignments.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 offers several enhancements to alerts and notifications, including support for filters, richer information within each alert, and more flexibility for customizing how alerts are sent and received. Additionally, in the new version, when a task is created, the user to whom the task is assigned will automatically receive a notification.

Microsoft Office Away from the Office

Highly integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 employs the familiar collaboration tools you know and use every day. Microsoft Office Access® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, and Microsoft Office Groove® 2007extend the collaboration capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, enabling individuals to take work offline, and make it easier for teams to collaborate beyondthe traditional e-mail communications commonly used by geographically dispersed teams.

Office Access 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Office Access 2007provides a rich experience for people to work in data-centric programs that can be connected to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 lists. For example, using Office Access 2007, you can work with list data from an issue tracking list stored on a team site, taking advantage of Office Access 2007editing, bulk manipulation, and reporting workflow features. In addition, because Office Access 2007is capable of cachinglist data locallyand synchronizing changes with data stored on the server, information from data-centric programs can be worked with offline.[v]

Office Outlook 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Within Office Outlook 2007, you can view specific SharePoint lists such as calendars, discussions, document libraries[vi], tasks and contactsstored on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites. Office Outlook 2007 also enables you to take document libraries (or subsets of libraries orfolders) offline and provides a built-in preview/reading experience within Office Outlook 2007, as well as full text search. You can alsocreate and manage workspaces for editing documents and organizing meetings. Offline support andseamless synchronization enables youtoaccess and work with information fromWindows SharePoint Services 3.0 workspaces within Office Outlook 2007, even without an Internet connection.

For example, before leaving the office to travel to a customer location, you can save a copy of a document, such as a proposal presentation, stored in your team’s workspace, to a special folder in Office Outlook 2007. While you’re on the road, even on an airplane and without Internet access, you can continue to work on the presentation, either previewing it within Office Outlook 2007 or editing it with Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007. When you reestablish an Internet connection, you will be able to synchronize your local presentation changes with the shared copy in the workspace.

Figure 4: Users can connect files and libraries stored on Windows

SharePoint Services sites with Office Outlook 2007.

Users can also view team calendar and contactlists stored in workspaces through the Office Outlook 2007 user interface, displaying them side-by-side or overlaid with their own personal lists. Used with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office Outlook 2007 becomes a versatile, one-stop location for your personal and team information on SharePoint sites.

Office Outlook Mobile and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Just as information stored on SharePoint sites can be accessed through Office Outlook 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 enables Pocket PC users who have Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile installed to access SharePoint items—calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents—through Office Outlook Mobile.

Office Groove 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The Microsoft Office Groove 2007 collaboration software program further extends Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 capabilities. Office Groove 2007 is used by companies of all sizes as a solution for distributed teamwork. Using Office Groove 2007, you can work with external partners, suppliers, and customers—collaborating within the same workspace—without requiring each workspace member to have permission to the same internal networks.

Files from Office Groove 2007 workspaces can be easily transferred to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workspaces, providing you more options for how and with whom information is shared. Sharing between Office Groove 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 helps keep information centrally located (rather than sharing it in e-mail) and makes it accessible to a wider audience.

Figure 5: Synchronizing Windows SharePoint Services files to Office Groove 2007.

A Workspace for Every Need

Teams can easily create and implement standard Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workspaces without involving IT support. For organizations and teams wanting to create more customized workspaces, Microsoft provides a variety of templates for designing custom workspaces. Called Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, these templates can accommodate more complex vertical and horizontal business processes. Application templates are out-of-the-box custom scenarios for workspace content, tailored to address the needs and requirements of specific business processes or sets of tasks in organizations of any size.

Although an application template may be used to streamline a specific business process, with the new mobile features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 they can further enhance efficiency by improving mobile access to business applications and to a wider range of collaborative tools and by helping employees stay productive while away from the office.

For example, the new GroupBoard Workspace 2007 application template allows users to create a meeting schedule, book meeting rooms, send out memos via phone or e-mail, locate another team member, and more. Mobile users can access GroupBoard Workspace 2007 information from the browser of their mobile device, helping them keep in touch with the team and up-to-date on team happenings even on the road.

Other application templates that enhance mobile productivity also support additional business processes and departments including human resources, IT, sales and marketing, inventory management, and customer relationship management.

Conclusion

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides new and enhanced tools for helping teams stay productive by providing access to the people, documents, and information they need. With new support for mobile devices, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 can boost your organization’s ability to collaborate while teams are geographically dispersed, continually on the go, and outside the company firewall.

Learn more about the new features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and how they can help improve collaboration and productivity for people and teams within your organization, even when they are away from the office:

• Windows SharePoint Services on Microsoft Office Online:
• Learn more about the 2007 Microsoft Office system:
• Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services:

[i]To take advantage of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on your mobile device, your device must meet the system requirements located here:

[ii] By default, this mobile page redirect feature is only enabled on team sites and blog sites. To enable mobile redirects for other sites, certain settings must be adjusted. In situations where the mobile page redirect is not activated, the page can be accessed from the actual page URL written in the following format:

[iii] To download, view, and edit Microsoft Office files on your mobile device, you must have installed Microsoft Office Mobile or another program capable of viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents.

[iv] To use this feature, you must be using a mobile device capable of sending e-mail. To dial a phone number by clicking a hyperlink, the phone number must be in the correct format, such as +1 (425) 885-8080.

[v] Office Access 2007 does not synchronize information from document libraries.

[vi]While Office Outlook 2007 enables offline viewing of information in Windows SharePoint Services document libraries, Office Groove 2007 provides full-featured, dynamic collaboration for teams who work with document libraries.