Document Management with SharePoint

Office 2007 includes new document management features specifically for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007, the latest versions of Microsoft’s portal, Web-based collaboration, and content management products. Shown here are dialog boxes for two document management features in the new suite.

Among other functions, the SharePoint products support basic document management (revision control and versioning) and Web-based document sharing and collaboration. Office 2007 supports these features as Office 2003 did; for example, Office 2007 users can check documents in and out of SharePoint sites and create new sites for group authoring or meetings without leaving the suite’s UI.

However, Office 2007 also has new features to support the latest SharePoint products, including the following:

Offline support. Outlook 2007 users can automatically maintain replicas of SharePoint document libraries as folders. This ensures that the user can work with documents in a document library while offline. By default, Office 2007 also automatically creates local copies of documents that the user has checked out from a SharePoint site so that the documents will be available offline. Previous versions of Office left the master copy of a checked-out document on the server.