Random thoughts about Outlook and SharePoint - Better Together

A customer contacted me and asked for a summary of how Outlook complements SharePoint.

• People love Outlook – it has become the “default communication tool”
• Emails, Contacts, Calendars (tasks to a lesser degree)
• SharePoint allows you to store information in a scalable, secure environment whilst enabling other users to use/create/modify/collaborate on the content.
• Example: Outlook tasks today can be emailed around between people but it is hard to track this effectively.
• In SharePoint using a Task List or a “Project Lite” project plan a quasi project manager can centrally managed tasks. These tasks will get emailed to subscribed users and if the user has “connected the project lite list to outlook”  (via the Actions menu) the tasks assigned to them will automatically be synchronised via webservices down to their outlook.
• The user could then update their tasks, create new tasks, reassign tasks etc. As per normal in Outlook
• These tasks would then be synchronised up to the SharePoint Project Lite List and the project manager could be alerted or they could be synchronised to other users.
• What connections does SharePoint have to Outlook 2007?
• Two Way Synchronisation (i.e. read and update from Outlook)
• Contact Lists in SharePoint --> Contact Folders in Outlook
• Discussions --> Discussion lists in Outlook (similar to public folders)
• Task Lists --> Tasks
• Project Lite Lists --> Tasks
• Calendars --> Calendars
• Read only in Outlook
• Document Libraries or specific folders --> Shared Document folders
• Outlook is an RSS Aggregator – SharePoint is an RSS Generator for Lists, Searches and also Content Query Parts (end user configured queries for specific content in SharePoint).
• Other
• Users can subscribe to “alerts”. Which means SharePoint will notify them of changes to CONTENT or SEARCHES or server events (errors & long running tasks).
• These alerts get delivered to the user via EMAIL.
• Compliance – Outlook Managed mail folders (policy driven folders) can save documents from outlook directly into Records Repository in SharePoint.