James Morgan on Collaboration

Getting Started ‘Addin’s’ for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (only for Office 2007 Users)

James — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:54:09 +0000

We recently released publically available additional ribbon tabs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 applications to help new users easily find interesting and informative content and support them in navigating around the new UI.

These are available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?DisplayLang=en&nr=20&productId=4289AE77-4CBA-4A75-86F3-9FF96F68E491&sortCriteria=date

The commands on the new tab give easy access to free content on Office Online that helps you learn the applications such as Word 2007 quickly.

SharePoint 2007 functionality gains by having Office (Excel) 2007

James — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 09:03:34 +0000

The following is a comprehensive but not necessarily complete list of the functions gained by having Excel 2007 with Sharepoint 2007;

· Publish spreadsheets to Excel Services o web-based spreadsheet accesso web-services interface to the spreadsheets· Enterprise Content Management o Ability to complete meta-data in the Information Property Panelo Ability to create custom Information Property Panels with business logic using InfoPath o In-client workflows (initiate, complete, etc.)o Ability to see a document requires workflow actions (approve, sign, etc.)o Ability to see a document is locked and requires check-out to be modifiedo Ability to see relevant corporate policies right in Officeo Rich Document signature workflow process

Excel Services and Information Rights Management

James — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:01:40 +0000

In my bLog posting i have covered Information Rights Management (IRM) quite alot and its one of the key reasons why customers move to the higher end of Office 2007 SKU’s though many organisation fail to see the value and purely look at the license cost. IRM is a way to provide privacy protection for a Microsoft Office document and to ensure that sensitive information is only viewed by appropriate people. For example, you may want to report quarterly financial data only to select members of an executive committee one month before the data becomes publicly available in a financial statement, so they have time to prepare public relation responses and make appropriate business decisions.

Windows SharePoint Services Version 3.0 or later supports IRM on a document library and all the documents in that library (whether or not those individual documents are enabled with IRM). Once the document is uploaded to a document library enabled with IRM, the document, in effect, becomes IRM-enabled.

Excel Services does not support loading Excel workbooks that have been enabled with IRM, and it does not load an Excel workbook if it is enabled with IRM or comes from a document library enabled with IRM. However, if you want to take advantage of IRM, you can load an Excel workbook without IRM into Excel Services, open the workbook as a snapshot, and then save the snapshot to a document library that is enabled with IRM.

For more information, see the Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Help system and the Office SharePoint Server Central Administration Help system.

Introduction to Excel Services

James — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:58:15 +0000

Excel Services is a Microsoft Office SharePoint technology that makes it simple to use, share, secure, and manage Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbooks (.xslx, xslb) as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout the enterprise.

There are three basic components to Excel Services that interact with each other and together form the overall structural design of Excel Services;

Excel Calculation Services (ECS) is the “engine” of Excel Services that loads the workbook, calculates in full fidelity with Microsoft Office Excel 2007, refreshes external data, and maintains sessions.

Excel Web Access (EWA) is a Web Part that displays and enables interaction with the Microsoft Office Excel workbook in a browser by using Dynamic Hierarchical Tag Markup Language (DHTML) and JavaScript without the need for downloading ActiveX controls on your client computer, and can be connected to other Web Parts on dashboards and other Web Part Pages.

Excel Web Services (EWS) is a Web service hosted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Services that provides several methods that a developer can use as an application programming interface (API) to build custom applications based on the Excel workbook.

Because Excel Services is a component of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can also take advantage of many SharePoint technology features such as, controlling, securing, and managing access to spreadsheets, server-based performance, and ability to scale well when users are added.

So where does this start to get fruity? Well the answer is as always when we start to look at some deployment scenarios to mkae this thing real.

Of course, there are countless ways that you can use Excel Services, but the following is a representative list of scenarios and examples to help you better understand how you might use Excel Services.

Business intelligence dashboards An executive committee has access to several company dashboards that act as an up-to-date financial scoreboard for the company. To continuously assess company performance, the main dashboard summarizes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as sales goals, target revenues, and profit margins, on a monthly basis. Additional dashboards summarize market news to help analyze financial risk for current and new projects, and to display charts of critical financial data to help evaluate different investment portfolios.

Retail store decision-making tool A retail chain summarizes critical point-of-sales data on a weekly basis and shares it with suppliers, financial analysts, and regional managers. Reports include current items below inventory, top 20 selling items by sales categories, important seasonal data, and transaction counts by each store.

And for me the most interesting scenario and where the richest vein of IP protection is concerned;

Proprietary financial analysis calculation model A large financial institution has researched and developed a pricing model that is private intellectual property. The results of the formula need to be shared with some investment managers, but the formula that is used to calculate the pricing model must be secure and never be publicly revealed. This pricing model is extremely complex and takes a long time to calculate. Every night, the pricing model report is calculated and created on a fast server, saved to a trusted location, and displayed on a Web Part Page, but only to those who have appropriate permission.

SharePoint 2007 functionality gains by having Office (Word) 2007

James — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:15:22 +0000

The following is a comprehensive but not necessarily complete list of the functions gained by having Word 2007 with Sharepoint 2007.

· Enterprise Content Management o Ability to complete meta-data in the Information Property Panelo Ability to create custom Information Property Panels with business logic using InfoPath o In-client workflows (initiate, complete, etc.)o Ability to see a document requires workflow actions (approve, sign, etc.)o Ability to see a document is locked and requires check-out to be modifiedo Ability to see relevant corporate policies right in Officeo Rich Document signature workflow process· Ability to author and publish web content· When opening a Word 2007 document from SharePoint 2007…o ability to see all previous published and draft versionso ability to restore back to any previous versiono ability to perform a graphical comparison between any two versions· Ability to create a new Blog posting or Wiki in SharePoint right from Word· Barcodes and meta-data labels when printing content

SharePoint CAL’s who needs ‘em?

James — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:42:08 +0000

So here is a scenario i have recently been involved with and i thought it worth a post as it would easy to get caught out on this - “I’ve recently installed SharePoint Portal Server within the organisation. As a start I’ve purchased approximately 150 user CAL’s for the Portal, if I allow someone access to a portal site as a ‘Reader’ does that constitute usage of one of those licences or does it only apply to someone that can contribute and officially ‘use’ the site?

The answer to this question is as follows “organisations must acquire and assign a CAL to each device or user that accesses your instances of the server software directly or indirectly.” Therefore, even if the users are accessing the server to only read documents, they still require a CAL.

SharePoint 2007 functionality gains by having Office (Outlook) 2007

James — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:55:12 +0000

The following is a comprehensive but not necessarily complete list of the functions gained by having Outlook 2007 with Sharepoint 2007;

Ability to take SharePoint content offline: document libraries, contacts, calendars, and tasks· Ability to overlay SharePoint calendars with other calendars (people, resources, etc.) and fully edit the calendar in Outlook, including offline· Ability to send an HTML email version of a SharePoint calendar to anyone, including outside the organization· Ability to send InfoPath electronic forms via Outlook as an email. Results can be stored in SharePoint. Drops-downs can also be fed from SharePoint.· Ability to have tasks from OneNote, SharePoint, and Project Server consolidate inside of Outlook· Ability to approve tasks/workflows right from Outlook without having to open SharePoint or the Office content· Records management for email messages (assuming Exchange 2007 is installed) and the ability to integrate those emails with SharePoint’s record management capabilities· RSS reader – all SharePoint content is available via RSS feeds, Outlook 2007 has an integrated RSS reader· From SharePoint, people can now e-mail a link directly to a document/file. When the user clicks on the link, the document will open in read mode and a button will appear telling the user they can edit it or check it out to make changes. This allows sending a link for both read and edit purposes.

Business Intelligence using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

James — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:16:21 +0000

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee so they can share, control, and reuse business information to make better business decisions. The BI features in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide Web and programmatic access to published Office Excel spreadsheets, programmatic reuse of critical LOB data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound KPIs, Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.

Top Features at A Glance:

Web Access to Published Spreadsheets
Integrated, Flexible Publishing
Programmatic Access to Published Spreadsheets
Data Connection Libraries
Business Data Catalog
Business Data SharePoint Lists and Web Parts
Business Data Actions
Data Connection Libraries
KPIs/Dashboards
Report Center Web Sites
Excel Services Management
BI Web-Parts
Server-based Excel spreadsheets and data visualization

Business Intelligence and Electronic Forms using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

James — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:15:34 +0000

For the first time ever, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables users to create forms, populate them with data from business applications, publish them on the Web, and initiate document-oriented workflows – all that directly from their familiar Microsoft Office user interface or from within their Internet Browser.

Top Features at A Glance:

Deploy and manage forms centrally
Integrate forms with Outlook 2007
Import forms· Digitally sign forms
Create forms without coding
Integration with business applications

Enterprise-wide content management enabled by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

James — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:14:34 +0000

The new and enhanced content management capabilities in MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 comprise three areas:

Document Management
Records Management
Web Content Management

Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality: major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on these capabilities to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Top Features at A Glance:

Web content editor and in-context authoring
Authoring processes (traditional)
Enterprise-wide layout templates
Scalability
Integration with business applications
Enterprise-wide metadata management
Enterprise-wide templates for all types of content
Integration with Office 2007 through a task bar and information panel
Version control, check-in/check-out
Document workflows (to be customized with MS Office SharePoint Designer)
Integration with business applications
Tamperproof repository storage
Integration of “e-mails as records”
Policy definition and monitoring/auditing