Alberto Ortega’s Blog

If you are looking for a way to organize the regular meetings on your organization, like sending invitations, discussing the objectives, centralizing all the information and materials for one or more meetings, etc, you could should evaluate the use of Meeting Workspaces on Windows Sharepoint Services, if you don’t know what a meeting workspace could be used to, here is link for getting started : http://usa1021.wss.bcentral.com/_vti_bin/help/1033/sts/html/mabtmws.htm

Besides the advantages of meeting workspaces, many users finds it difficult to manage the meeting, events and invitation by browsing a Sharepoint site, you can avoid this and unleash the power of sharepoint by integrating this functionality with outlook 2003.

WSS Meeting Workspaces and Outlook 2003
On this Post, “Eric Legault” show how simple is to create meeting workspaces and send invitations from Outlook 2003, I will go further and show you how your Outlook 2003 environment could be “tuned” to follow a centralized calendar, shared by a group of people (possibly working as a team on a project).

We are going to take as a starting point for this example the folder “My Sharepoint Site” created on my previous post. You will also need a sharepoint site which we will use to share the calendar and meetings.

Create a child folder for “My Sharepoint Site” folder, called “Events”, right click the folder and select “Properties”.

On the “Home Page” tab, on the “Address” field enter the URL needed to access the Events option on the Sharepoint site that you will be using to manage the meetings, this URL always is like: http://mycompany.com/mysite/Lists/Events/AllItems.aspx.
Check the “Show home page by default for this folder” option.

Note: If you click con “My Sharepoint Site” folder, you will see the Sharepoint site on the right panel, you can right click the “Events” link, and select “Copy Shortcut” to get this URL.

Now, click on the “Link to Outlook” option. If you are prompted for the action to be completed, click YES.

Great! On your Calendar view, you have direct access to the Sharepoint calendar, that if one user creates a meeting for a particular meeting workspace on the Sharepoint site every user who has the calendar linked to it’s Outlook 2003 see that a meetings is going to take place.

If you want to create a meeting you cannot simply add it from the Calendar’s view on Outlook, this is because Outlooks takes a read-only copy from the Sharepoint calendar that cannot be used to add meetings.

This is why we have created an “Events” folder, now, without leaving Outlook, you can create a new meeting. Go ahead, click on the “Events” folder and create a new meeting for testing purposes, when the meeting is created you events folder should look something like this:

Now go and check the Calendar view, you should see the Meeting created in Sharepoint from your Outlook 2003.

That’s all, I hope you find this useful, feel free to ask any question, I will be glad to answer.

Related Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c4061881x.mspx

n this post I’m going to show one of the many ways that MS Outlook 2003 can be integrated with Windows Sharepoint Services.

For the examples through this post, I’m using MS Outlook 2003 Professional SP2 and WSS SP1.

We will cover two key aspects of the integration:
1) WSS as a central repository for contacts.
2) WSS Meeting Workspaces and Outlook 2003

WSS as a central repository for contacts.

Outlook contacts administration on an organization can be done by many ways. If you have an Exchange Server as your mail server, Outlook 2003 clients working connected to the Exchange Server can take advantage of the Global Address List (http://computerperformance.co.uk/exchange2003/exchange2003_GAL.htm), if they work disconnected they can use the Offline Address Book feature (http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Offline-Address-Book-Best-Practice.html).

This approaches basically expose all Active Directory Mail-Enabled Accounts, Contacts, Mail-Enabled Contacts and Distribution Groups, so clients can query for the desired contact when sending an email. Everyone uses Outlook contacts because an email address could be hardly stored more that an hour in our brain, so here is the question: What if I want my Contacts to be available for anyone to use them?

As we have talked so far, the only way is to ask our AD Admin to add a Contact on Active Directory, so the contact will be available through the Global Address List. However there’s another way for sharing contacts between any group of users on the organization, the contacts can be stored on Windows Sharepoint Services.

First we need to prepare our Outlook 2003 environment in order to manage this shared contacts as easily as it could be.

Create a Folder named “My Sharepoint Site” and edit it’s properties. On the “Home Page Tab” on the “Address” field enter the URL of the WSS site that you will use to store the contacts and check the “Show home page by default for this folder” option.

Create another child folder called “Contacts” and use the Contacts URL of the Sharepoint Site, generally: http://mycompany.com/mysite/Lists/Contacts/AllItems.aspx.

This was done to mimic the Sharepoint folders structure on Outlook, this was my approach, of course that you can organize folders as you wish.
The Contacts on this workspace will work as a centralized contacts repository where everyone who can access the Sharepoint site will be able to use.

Now, click on the “Link to Outlook” option. If will be prompted for the action to be completed, click YES.
Great! On your contacts view, you have direct access to the contacts that are stored in Sharepoint, the name generated for the contacts container will be “Your Site Name - Contacts”.

This is how you will get the Contacts from Sharepoint when everyone adds one. We still need to upload contacts to the sharepoint, and this also can be done without leaving Outlook.
If you try to add a Contact by double-clicking on the panel of the right, you will get the following error:

It’s pretty self explanatory, what Outlook 2003 does behind the scenes is fetch a local copy from Sharepoint to show you the contacts, you cannot add contacts by this way.
Instead you should go to the “Contacts” folder previously created and click the “Import Contacts” button. You will be prompted for the contacts that you want to import, you can search contacts from any source that this Outlook 2003 Client has, that includes, the Global Address List, the Offline Address Book and locally create contacts. Select any contact in order to make a little test.

Now you should see that the contact has been listed on the Sharepoint Site. Navigate to Outlook Contacts and check that that contact has been added there too.

Besides that it’s pretty straightforward to integrate Outlook 2003 with WSS. The Offline Address Book relies on the Public Folder feature of Exchange Server 2003. Microsoft is encouraging IT Professionals to move from Public Folders to Sharepoint products as a step forward. Read more about this on (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/pubfolders_faq.mspx).

WSS Meeting Workspaces and Outlook 2003
I will talk about this kind of integration tomorrow, on my next post .

Related Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c4061881x.mspx