Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit (Pro-Resource Kit)

What’s New in Windows SharePoint Services

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services helps users work together and share information. SharePoint sites provide a central repository for documents, information, and ideas, and allow users to work interactively with these items and with each other.

Windows SharePoint Services is an update and revision to SharePoint Team Services v1.0 from Microsoft, and offers many improvements over SharePoint Team Services v1.0.

What’s new for administrators of Windows SharePoint Services

The architecture for Windows SharePoint Services has been revised from that of SharePoint Team Services v1.0. The new architecture allows you to separate the Web hosting processes from the site data retrieval processes. All documents, metadata, and site data are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine 2000 (MSDE) database, rather than split between a database and the Web server metadata. This improves reliability by ensuring complete transactional integrity of the data, and enables larger scale scenarios.

You can have multiple, stateless front-end Web servers, and one or more back-end database servers, so you can create a load-balanced server farm for large organizations or Internet service providers (ISPs). Of course, Windows SharePoint Services can still be installed quickly to a single server if your organization’s needs are simpler.

The following new features have been added for administrators of Windows SharePoint Services:

• Easy installation for small deployments If you want to set up Windows SharePoint Services on a single server with MSDE, you can run Setup with the default settings and have a working site within minutes.

• Support for server farm deployments With Windows SharePoint Services, you can set up a server farm configuration, which includes multiple front-end Web servers and multiple back-end databases.

• Site migration SharePoint Team Services v1.0 sites can be migrated to Windows SharePoint Services by using the command-line migration tool (Smigrate.exe).

• Site level backup and restore Each site in a server farm can be individually backed up and restored. This feature can be used for archiving inactive sites prior to their deletion.

• Support for multiple language sites Multiple language sites can be hosted on a single server or server farm running Windows SharePoint Services. Each site can also have its own regional settings, such as time zone.

• Site quotas and notifications Server administrators can set quotas for site storage size and generate automatic notifications for the site owner when a site reaches its size limit.

For more information about any of these features, or for information about installing and managing Windows SharePoint Services, see the Administrator’s Guide for Windows SharePoint Services on the Window SharePoint Services Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/assistance.

Using Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services together

When you use both Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services in your organization, your users can take advantage of several Office 2003 features that interact with Windows SharePoint Services. For example, when using Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services together, users get:

• Integrated file open and save Users of Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office InfoPath™ 2003, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can open files from and save files directly to SharePoint sites from within the client application.

• Document check-in and check-out from the client application Users can check out or check in a file from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and FrontPage. Checking a file out locks the file while it is being edited, thus preventing others from overwriting or editing it inadvertently.

• Automatic metadata promotion File properties and metadata from Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and InfoPath documents are automatically copied and updated in SharePoint document libraries.

• Synchronized Events and Contacts lists With Outlook 2003, users can view Events and Contacts lists on a SharePoint site or in Outlook, and items hosted on a Windows SharePoint Services site can be dragged onto a user’s personal calendar in Outlook.

• Datasheet viewing and editing With Office 2003 installed on the user’s computer, list views are enhanced with the Edit in Datasheet option. This option offers a rich client-side editor for lists, which allows fast spreadsheet-style editing with add row, copy and paste, and “fill-down” as well as richer view filtering and sorting options.

• List data editing with Excel and Microsoft Office Access 2003 Users can edit, analyze, and synchronize data with SharePoint lists from within Excel and Access.

• Picture editing Users can view and edit pictures in a SharePoint picture library by using a new image-editing tool from Office 2003.

• Shared Attachments Users can send documents that are hosted in a SharePoint site as attachments. Local copies of Shared Attachments can be updated with the updated copy on the SharePoint site.

• Quick access to tasks with the Windows SharePoint Services Task Pane A task pane in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint shows information about the status of documents stored in SharePoint document libraries. The task pane displays data from the SharePoint site, such as presence of team members, document status and properties, related links, related documents, and tasks.

• Quick collaboration with Document Workspaces Users can use Word 2003 to create a Document Workspace on a Windows SharePoint Services server for collaboration on a document. Document Workspaces can also be created from the browser from within a SharePoint document library.

• Enhanced coordination with Meeting Workspaces Users can create Meeting Workspaces when they create a meeting invitation in Outlook. Meeting Workspaces provide a place for managing meetings and their collateral information such as attendees, agendas, documents, decisions, and action items. Attendee tracking is propagated to the SharePoint site automatically. Meeting Workspaces can also be created from SharePoint event lists.

• Solution package creation in FrontPage 2003 Sites can be packaged for deployment in every location in an organization by using FrontPage 2003 solution packages. Web log, News and Reviews, and Issue tracking solution packages are available out of the box.

• Web Parts and Web Part previewing in FrontPage 2003 Users can browse and search Web Part galleries to locate Web Parts for use in a Web Part Page. They can preview Web Parts in FrontPage 2003 before publishing them, and they can build new user interfaces by creating Web Part connections between Web Parts on the same page and across pages by using FrontPage 2003.

• Integration with Microsoft Business Solutions Users with Office 2003 can take advantage of the templates for Great Plains and Web Parts for data (such as DataCalc or Web Clipper). These are available as the Microsoft Office Web Parts and Components package to enhance Windows SharePoint Services.

• Integration between InfoPath 2003 and SharePoint form libraries Users with InfoPath 2003 can publish a solution package into a SharePoint form library. Key properties from the InfoPath documents are promoted into the form library so that they can be sorted and filtered, enabling the creation of custom views and editing through a SharePoint list.

• Document editing in InfoPath 2003 Users can start InfoPath 2003 from a SharePoint form library to autoaggregate a number of InfoPath files in that library and create a single report. For example, a user could create a rollup status report that combines the information from many individual status reports.

For more information about any of these features, see the Help system for Office 2003.