This week,
Laura Rogers and I worked on our slide presentation for
SPTechCon in Boston. A popular topic for my clients this year is Office 2007 integration with SharePoint and I asked Laura a few months ago if she would like to co-present this topic with me. What we both notice is that Office rollouts are typically treated separately from SharePoint deployments usually because IT departments have different project teams for servers and clients. This unfortunately results in a lack of training for end users on the fact that Office and SharePoint were literally made for each other.
- Look across multiple SharePoint libraries for documents that are checked out to me
- Do a topic search across multiple RSS feeds
Skip to the next section if you really don't care why you would or wouldn't promote these activities in your company and just want to know how to do it.
Let's start by first understanding the similarities and differences between Connect to Outlook and View RSS Feed. No matter what library or list view you are in, when you click Actions-Connect to Outlook or Actions-View RSS Feed, you are getting all the documents from the allitems.aspx page. No wonder no one is telling you about this feature! Imagine the space you are taking up on your client PC to house thousands of documents in a team collaboration library.
Copies of SharePoint documents are stored in an Outlook .pst folder, so if you are in a company that does not allow you to use .pst's, then you are out of luck
with the offline capability of connecting SharePoint lists and libraries to Outlook and for good reason - there is no way to see all the connections to Outlook from a SharePoint site. That means that in a content management scenario, this can be a real nightmare as you now have multiple copies of documents in local client .pst folders.
So why would I even bring it up? Because this is a search solution that increases user adoption of SharePoint and it is a good fit for companies who are not locked down by regulatory restrictions. If you are using collaboration sites with smaller numbers of files inside of document libraries or you lost the
metadata versus folders battle, then this is a great way to show people how to interact with files on SharePoint sites without having to leave Outlook. And don't forget that even though multiple folders apear inside of Outlook, only one SharePoint lists .pst is created to house them all, so if you are successfully managing .pst files through corporate policies, default location of .pst's, and rights management, then Connect to Outlook is still a great tool to increase user productivity.
However, if .pst's are never an option for you, then you could still use the RSS feed from the library to house links to those documents within the Outlook client. If you do not write custom feeds for the libraries, then you will only get the filename with a link to the document which won't seem as relevant in this scenario but still something to think about as you try to find search solutions for users as the number of documents in SharePoint increases. Remember too that there is a separate RSS feed for each library view (modify this view - click the RSS button) which allows users to only bring over links to documents that are relevant to them.
This is a big deal for users who spend a lot of time accessing their email from Outlook Web Access via mobile devices because Outlook RSS Feeds are viewable in OWA. That means that they can get to SharePoint documents without having to navigate through the mobile page of the SharePoint site. Do you hear that? It's the sound of baby cherubs singing.
How to create a Search Folder in Outlook
There are plenty of instructions on how to
connect to Outlook or
add an RSS feed already on the internet but I couldn't find anything online that specifically talked about how to create a search folder for RSS Feeds or SharePoint lists. Feel free to link to your own article in the comments of this post if I missed one.
Search SharePoint Lists
- Connect your SharePoint libraries to Outlook.
- In Outlook, under SharePoint lists, right click on Search Folders, New Search Folder, then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list and click Create a custom Search Folder. Pay attention to where you are in your Outlook navigation - there is a separate list of Search Folders included in the SharePoint lists .pst. Remember that Search Folders are accessible from Outlook Web Access but .pst's are not, so you cannot create a search folder for a .pst in your Exchange folder.
- Click Choose and name the search 'Checked out to Me,' then click Criteria.
- Go to the Advanced Tab and click on Field. Hover over All Document Fields and click Checked out to.
- Condition contains your first or last name. Make sure it is consistent with how your name is listed on the SharePoint site.
- Click Add to List, then OK. OK. OK.
- To test, check out a document from one of the connected lists then click Send/Receive in Outlook. Pretty cool, huh?
Go back and look at that list of Document Fields and imagine the possibilities of using Outlook as a scope search on libraries across multiple SharePoint collections. This can be a great interim solution after enterprise search goes live but before you have time to create specific scopes or it can be a permanent IT timesaver by eliminating the need to write custom scopes for smaller groups. By showing people how to use this functionality, they can create their own search portal and the best part is that it reduces the calls on the SharePoint server and pushes search back down to the desktop. Users love fast search that only return relevant results.
Search RSS Feeds
- Add RSS feeds to Outlook - even if you are not using the SharePoint library scenario, this is a great way to search across multiple SharePoint blog or news feeds for one topic like "InfoPath."
- Create a new custom search folder. Click Choose and Browse - make sure that only RSS Feeds is checked. Click OK.
- Name the folder 'InfoPath' and click Criteria.
- Search for word InfoPath in subject field and message body. Click OK. OK. OK.
These two scenarios show you the importance of training users on business scenarios that effect their day-to-day work and not just making them click through the new features of a product. Search folders have been around since Outlook 2003, so this is not a new concept but with the addition of RSS Feeds and the ability to connect SharePoint libraries to Outlook 2007, you can see the necessity of making sure that use cases are developed and tested around SharePoint and Office integration points.