Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)
Part II. Optimizing
Chapter 20. Integrating Office Applications
Why are we talking about the Office 2013 client applications in a SharePoint 2013 book? The answer is simple: to maximize the value of your investment in the SharePoint platform, you will want to evaluate and take advantage of the integration and capabilities that are “lit up” through the Office client.
There is business value here: if you make it easy for users to work with SharePoint from within the context of the Office applications with which they already spend most of their time (e.g., Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint), you will give them the incentive to use SharePoint over other tools such as file shares and e-mail. It’s a virtuous cycle: as more properly tagged content is added to SharePoint, the more relevant search results will be; this then drives people to use your SharePoint environment and begin to access the social features, business intelligence, forms, and other tools.
The Office 2007 system added many features that worked “best” with a combination of Office 2007 client versions and SharePoint, for example, offline information and easy access to advanced SharePoint document management features such as workflow, metadata, and version control. Office 2010 extended integration with SharePoint via the Backstage and new Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
With the 2013 release, Microsoft has further advanced the role of the Office client in the SharePoint experience by enhancing integration with SharePoint in a number of areas, including the new SkyDrive Pro capabilities for personal file storage. The following topics are covered in this chapter:
What’s new in Office 2013
Office client applications that connect with SharePoint 2013
SkyDrive Pro—taking SharePoint content offline
Document and data caching
Backstage
Other clients: Office Web Apps and Office Mobile Applications
What’s New in Office 2013?
Microsoft designed Office 2013 to be integrated with cloud services. From a consumer perspective, Office suggests SkyDrive as the preferred file storage location. From an enterprise perspective, Office integrates with SkyDrive Pro as part of SharePoint 2013 on-premises or as part of SharePoint Online within Office 365. Similar to SharePoint, Microsoft’s Office strategy is moving away from major releases every three years to a much more frequent set of regular quarterly updates. Microsoft will be regularly releasing updates to Office via Office 365.
Office 2013 Professional Plus requires Windows 7 or Windows 8 on a personal computer. Prior versions of Windows, including Windows XP, are no longer supported with Office 2013.
Office Home & Student 2013 RT, released for the new Windows RT operating system, is installed with the device. For example, when you purchase a Surface RT tablet device from Microsoft, Office 2013 is included, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
There are also new Windows 8 applications available for Lync and OneNote which can be downloaded for free from the Windows Store. These applications are optimized for a touchscreen. Updates are coming soon for Office on the Mac.
Also updated in 2013 are the Web and mobile application companions for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that provide lightweight viewing and editing capabilities and are integrated with SharePoint. These applications are comparable to Outlook Web Access and Outlook mobile application access to an Exchange mailbox. The Office Web Apps have a new architecture in 2013: they can no longer be installed in a SharePoint farm. Office Web Apps, on-premises, must be installed on a separate set of servers that can now be shared with multiple SharePoint farms and other server applications that integrate with the Office Web Apps, such as Exchange 2013. The Office Web Apps are also available for free consumer use via SkyDrive and for enterprises via Office 365 subscriptions, including integration with SharePoint and Exchange Online.
Similar to SharePoint 2013, Office 2013 introduces a new apps model and marketplace. Previous Office applications and extensions, such as add-ins and macros, are still supported. The new Office apps model allows applications to be built using Web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. This model enables Office applications to run in both the Office clients and the Office Web Apps. The Office Marketplace provides a new way to publish and acquire applications for Office. Microsoft manages a public marketplace where third parties can make Office applications and document templates available for download (Figure 20-1). Organizations can also have a private Office application catalog for only their internal applications or to centrally manage third-party applications and licenses.
Figure 20-1 The Office Marketplace allows individuals and organizations to obtain a variety of applications directly from the Office client applications
The new Office has a special mode that is optimized for use with touch devices. In this mode (Figure 20-2), the icons are larger to make them easier to access with a finger, and the Office user interface is adjusted to place frequently used functions (e.g., the Delete button in Outlook) near the edges of the screen to enable people to easily work with content with their thumbs. Applications such as Word also have a new reading mode that is optimized for content consumption on a tablet device.
Figure 20-2 Outlook 2013 in touch mode. Note the icons and features available on the left and right sides of the screen which are designed for use on a tablet
Office 365 adds new capabilities to Office that are available only with Microsoft’s managed cloud offering. The new Office subscription service (named Office 365 ProPlus) enables organizations to license Office on a per-user basis. Users can install and use Office on up to five PC or Mac devices. Office 365 ProPlus enables software to be streamed to these devices where Microsoft can manage the updates. Organizations can elect to manage and distribute updates on their own, if so desired.
Office 365 ProPlus supports the ability to perform side-by-side installations where Office 2013 can coexist on a PC with older versions of Office, such as Office 2007 or 2010. The benefit of this is helping organizations to roll out the new Office while enabling users to use prior versions of Office which may be required for legacy applications and add-ins. Office side-by-side installs also help with training and communication plans to phase in the introduction of the new Office clients within organizations.
Office on Demand (Figure 20-3) is also available via Office 365. This capability allows individuals to temporarily install an Office application (e.g., Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) on another device. This feature is available when a user is viewing his or her SkyDrive Pro site within SharePoint Online. For example, say you were visiting a family member’s house on vacation and you needed to make an important update to an Office document that you have shared with others on your SkyDrive Pro. You could use the Office Web Apps to view and edit the document through the browser. But what if you needed to use an advanced capability in Word that is not supported in the browser, and the PC you are using does not have Office installed? In this case, Office on Demand allows you to temporarily stream and install Word on the PC (Windows 7 or Windows 8 only) that you are currently using. You can then perform the tasks needed, and when you exit Word, the program and your document are no longer available on the PC.
Figure 20-3 Office on Demand enables temporary use of Office client applications on other PCs
When Office is connected to SkyDrive or Office 365, it also enables Office to “roam” with you. This means that Office can remember the documents you most recently viewed or edited, regardless of the PC, tablet, or mobile device you last used. Office can also remember your exact location within a document when you closed the Office client so you can pick up right where you left off (Figure 20-4).
Figure 20-4 Office 2013 can remember the documents you were recently working with and where you left off
Office 2013 also improves the way that people collaborate on documents. Collaborative authoring, first introduced in the Office 2010 client and Web Apps, has been enhanced in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote—including the ability for people to simultaneously edit Word or PowerPoint documents via the Web browser. For example, multiple people can edit the same presentation file at the same time so team members can make their edits to different slides without the need to work serially and go through a series of document handoffs. Office has added threaded commenting within documents so people can have a “conversation” via comments (Figure 20-5) and reply to each other—similar to working within a discussion list but scoped to a specific document. Sharing (Figure 20-6) has also been integrated directly into the Office clients to make it easier for people to grant others View or Edit permissions to individual files and automatically send e-mail messages to invite others to access the document.
Figure 20-5 Office 2013 offers the ability to have threaded comments within a document
Figure 20-6 Office 2013 makes it easier to share SharePoint content with others and specify if they can view or edit the file
From an administrative perspective, Office 2013 introduces new capabilities. The new Office telemetry dashboard helps to monitor usage of Office documents and add-ins. This analytical information can help organizations to identify the Office documents and add-ins that are used most frequently and by which individuals and teams. This information is very helpful when planning for testing, upgrades, training, and migration and for being proactive in detecting and addressing support issues. The built-in Office 2013 telemetry capabilities replace the various stand-aloneutilities and resources that Microsoft previously provided, such as the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT), and Microsoft Office Code Compatibility Inspector.1
1. Microsoft Office 2010 migration-planning resources. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460876(v=office.14).aspx
In Office 2013, Microsoft also introduced new capabilities to help manage Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. These include the ability to perform comparisons to see what has changed from one version of a file to another (similar to what a developer may do with application code or how people have compared differences in Word documents in the past) and to use the new Excel “Inquire” capability to detect potential issues with spreadsheets such as analyzing formulas being used within workbooks. Many of these capabilities have been added to Office and SharePoint as a result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Prodiance.2
2. Microsoft Prodiance acquisition pathways Web site. www.microsoft.com/pathways/prodiance
One of the biggest changes that will affect SharePoint is the upgrade and repositioning of SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove), which has been morphed into the SkyDrive Pro client. SkyDrive Pro provides offline file and folder synchronization from SharePoint to your local file storage. Once installed, SkyDrive Pro creates a folder directly within Windows Explorer without requiring you to open a separate application to view, add, or edit files. Unfortunately, not all of the capabilities that existed within SharePoint Workspace are available in SkyDrive Pro. We will discuss these differences in depth later in this chapter.
OneNote has also been improved in 2013. OneNote is an application for capturing information from various formats (text, audio, images, etc.) and integrating them on one canvas. OneNote has rich integration with SharePoint, so multiple people can concurrently collaborate on a page within a shared OneNote notebook and have their changes automatically synchronized and tracked so people can see who changed what section and when. In some ways OneNote is like a wiki editor on steroids and can be used for various tasks such as meeting notes, brainstorming, policies, procedures, and training materials.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) has also been improved in SharePoint 2013 as the successor to the Business Data Catalog (BDC) that was introduced in SharePoint 2007. BCS enables you to establish a read/write connection with a back-end database such as a CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Siebel, or Dynamics) or ERP system (e.g., PeopleSoft or SAP) using tools such as SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio. Once created and published to SharePoint, the BCS connection can be reused by SharePoint lists and the Office 2013 clients (e.g., Outlook and Word) to view and edit data that is stored in the back-end system. More detailed information on BCS is provided in Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions.”
Note
While the Office 2013 clients add tighter integration with the latest SharePoint 2013 server product, it is not required that you upgrade your clients and servers at the same time. Microsoft will be publishing a “Business Productivity at Its Best” white paper that describes the integrated client and server capabilities and differences across versions of SharePoint and Office in more detail. Unfortunately, this document was not publicly available at the time this book was written. Microsoft’s TechNet Web site (www.technet.com) will have the document when it is available.
Office Client Applications That Connect with SharePoint 2013
The user interface in SharePoint 2013 has been improved, and many people work directly in their Web browser. But what if you’re going to be offline or you prefer to do your SharePoint work right in the context of the document that you are working on? Maybe you’re somewhere with very low bandwidth and you’re working with large files. Good news: Office 2013 has a few different options to help you out.
SharePoint 2013 has increased the integration with various Office 2013 clients. The SharePoint ribbon browser interface directly links you with the following Office and Windows clients, offering you the choice and flexibility to work with SharePoint in the context of the client tool that best supports the task you are performing:
Access. Enables you to work with SharePoint list data offline in a read/write fashion. Also great for mashing up SharePoint data with other data sources (databases, spreadsheets, etc.) and creating queries and polished reports. This fits in well with the overall SharePoint Composite Application strategy and provides you with another alternative for migrating local Access databases to a shared and managed platform, including the updated Access Services SharePoint capabilities. Access Services enables you to publish an Access database and have the data, forms, macros, and queries be usable via a Web browser.
Excel. Continued support for browser-based Excel Services. Updated Office Web Apps companion for browser-based viewing, editing, and coauthoring of spreadsheets. Continued integration of Excel with SharePoint for saving documents, adding metadata, checking in/checking out, and workflow. Great for taking a list offline and performing advanced analysis using capabilities such as charts, graphs, slicers, and PivotTables. New business intelligence capabilities including PowerPivot and PowerView for creating advanced reports and publishing them to SharePoint via Excel Services. Excel also has a new “Inquire” capability that helps with inspecting Excel files to look for issues and irregularities such as cells within a table that may be missing formulas—which is key since many organizations rely on Excel for financial analysis and modeling. Inquire helps to flag cells to inspect closely to make sure there are no irregularities within your spreadsheets.
InfoPath. Tool for making advanced forms which can then be reused across SharePoint (via InfoPath Forms Services) and other Office applications (Word, Access, Outlook). InfoPath supports the creation of InfoPath Forms Services Web Part controls so you can mash up InfoPath controls on the same as page as other SharePoint data and Web Parts.
Lync. Application for providing instant messaging and presence (free, busy, in a meeting, etc.). Lync can also be used for audio, video, and desktop sharing. Integration with SharePoint and other Office applications to see when someone is online and to then engage with that person directly—for example, when coauthoring a Word document.
Office Upload Center. Performs per-document-level caching and central access to see all SharePoint files you have viewed recently and which items are pending check-in, regardless of which SharePoint site the content originally came from. Synchronizes changes only between the client and server applications across the Office suite.
OneNote. Advanced wiki capabilities for collaborating, brainstorming, and sharing information. Updated Office Web Apps companion for browser-based viewing and editing of information, including coauthoring support in both the browser and rich desktop client for concurrent editing.
Outlook. Primarily used for personal information management (PIM) and a personalized view of SharePoint team information. Examples include read/write access to SharePoint calendars, tasks, contacts, and discussion boards—even while offline. Outlook includes an updated Outlook Social Connector (OSC) which displays news and activity feeds for your contacts from SharePoint 2013 as well as other social systems (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook) in a centralized view to help improve your collaboration experience. Outlook 2013 also integrates with the new Site Mailbox capability that has been added to SharePoint and Exchange 2013.
PowerPoint. Continued integration of PowerPoint with SharePoint for saving documents, adding metadata, checking in/checking out, and workflow as well as slide libraries. Updated Office Web Apps companion for browser-based viewing and editing of presentations. Client supports coauthoring so multiple people can edit the same presentation concurrently. Web companion now supports coauthoring as well. Updated features to add videos and photos directly from SharePoint and the Internet and to edit these digital assets (e.g., change display, trim, resize).
Project. Supports exporting SharePoint task lists into Project for more sophisticated reporting on project tasks, milestones, dependencies, resources, and so on.
SharePoint Designer. A free desktop application provided by Microsoft for advanced SharePoint site customization, including creating and managing reusable workflows and BCS. One major change in SharePoint Designer 2013 is the removal of the design view while working with page design. This topic, and alternative approaches, is discussed further in Chapter 14, “Managing Web Content.”
SkyDrive Pro. Replaces SharePoint Workspace. Used for taking SharePoint document libraries offline—either at the site or per library level. Synchronizes changes only to efficiently use network bandwidth.
Visio. With Visio you can create workflows graphically through new integration with SharePoint Designer 2013. You can also create browser-based Visio diagrams (using Visio Services as part of SharePoint) and export SharePoint task lists to a graphical Visio diagram.
Windows Explorer. SharePoint continues to integrate with Windows Explorer for both uploading and copying documents between SharePoint and another file storage location such as your local PC storage or a network file share. Integrate with SkyDrive Pro to have direct offline access to SharePoint files without opening another desktop application.
Word. Continued integration of Word with SharePoint for saving documents, adding metadata, checking in/checking out, and workflow. Updated Office Web Apps companion for browser-based viewing and editing of documents. Both client and Web application now support coauthoring so multiple people can edit the same document concurrently.
SkyDrive Pro—Taking SharePoint Documents Offline
The SkyDrive Pro (SDP) desktop client is the replacement for SharePoint Workspace (SPW). SPW was the evolution of the product that was formerly known as Groove, which Microsoft purchased in 2005.
The SDP client is currently installed as part of Office 2013 Professional. There is also a free standalone download of SkyDrive Pro available from Microsoft. Microsoft has also released SkyDrive Pro applications for iOS and Windows RT. We will focus in the remainder of this chapter on the SDP client that ships with Office 2013 for Windows 7 or Windows 8.
SDP has the following primary capabilities:
Sync. SDP enables you to synchronize a SharePoint document library offline. The document library could be from your personal site, or it could be a document library from a team or project site.
Windows Explorer integration. SDP integrates directly into Windows Explorer and appears as any other folder within the file system. Files and folders can be created, copied, or moved into the local SDP folder and synchronized with SharePoint automatically.
Conflict resolution. SDP manages conflicts (cases where more than one person updates the same file at the same time) at the item level. This means that if two people edit the same document in a shared library at the same time, SDP will identify the conflict and allow the user to select which version of the file to keep. This also allows multiple people to edit the same file concurrently without the need to have people serially check the document in and out of SharePoint.
Binary differentials. When SDP syncs data, it syncs only changes since the last sync. For example, if you have an 8MB PowerPoint file synced locally in SDP and someone makes a change to one slide, SDP will sync only the parts of that single slide that changed. This is great in general and especially when you’re on a slower network, wireless, or mobile connection.
Desktop search. SDP enables you to use desktop search to locally search for and find content that has been taken offline within the tool.
Using SkyDrive Pro
The SkyDrive Pro client application can be used in two primary ways. The typical use case is to synchronize files and folders from your personal SkyDrive Pro (documents that are stored as part of your SharePoint 2013 personal site) to your local computer. You can also synchronize document libraries from SharePoint sites. Since the user experience is similar when you are synchronizing documents from personal sites or team sites, we will focus in this section on setting up your personal site to sync.
To access your SkyDrive Pro library (Figure 20-7) click the SkyDrive link at the top of any page within SharePoint 2013. The first time you click the Sync icon on a PC that has Office 2013 installed, the SkyDrive Pro configuration wizard will prompt you for a local storage location to synchronize your files and folders (Figure 20-8).
Figure 20-7 A typical SkyDrive Pro library for an individual using SharePoint 2013
Figure 20-8 Initial SkyDrive Pro setup
After the SkyDrive Pro wizard completes the initial setup, clicking the “Show my files” option takes you to the location that you specified to synchronize your files to (Figure 20-9). You can now create, copy, delete, and rename files and folders locally within your SkyDrive Pro folder (Figure 20-10). These files are visible within Windows Explorer, and any changes that you make locally, or on the SharePoint server, are automatically kept in sync. By default, each SkyDrive Pro document library within SharePoint 2013 has a Shared with Everyone folder; content stored in this folder is visible to anyone within your organization. File and folder permissions and sharing within your SkyDrive Pro document library work the same as for other SharePoint document libraries. SDP will replicate the file synchronization experience from SPW.
Figure 20-9 SkyDrive Pro initial setup completion screen
Note that in Figure 20-10 there are two Favorites folders with the name SkyDrive in them. The first folder named SkyDrive is the local integration and synchronization with Microsoft’s consumer SkyDrive file-sharing service. The SkyDrive @ Microsoft location is SkyDrive Pro since in this example, SkyDrive Pro is hosted at Microsoft as part of SharePoint Online (Office 365). This is something that you will want to consider during your planning for user communications and training.
Figure 20-10 Your SkyDrive Pro folder and files are made available directly within Windows Explorer
SharePoint Workspace and Groove Features No Longer Available
SharePoint Workspace (SPW) had a number of capabilities that are not available in SkyDrive Pro. These include
Extended offline capabilities. SPW allowed you to take non-document SharePoint library data offline. For example, you could use SPW to synchronize an offline copy of a custom SharePoint list that you may have been using to track customer support information.
Version management. SPW allowed you to directly check documents in or out of SharePoint without having to access SharePoint in a Web browser.
Metadata attributes. SPW showed SharePoint metadata for files in the offline list view.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS). BCS integration via SharePoint lists allowed you to use SPW to work with external data lists offline. Examples of this included working with CRM, ERP, or custom LOB systems.
InfoPath forms integration. SPW used InfoPath for its forms and allowed you to work offline with a set of SharePoint forms.
Classic Groove workspaces. These were used for non-SharePoint-based collaboration and information exchange both within the organization and externally with customers and partners. These Groove workspaces worked via either a peer-to-peer synchronization or via Groove relay, audit, and management servers.
Migrating from SharePoint Workspace to SkyDrive Pro
There is no direct migration path from SharePoint Workspace to SkyDrive Pro. In most cases, customers were using SPW for synchronizing files offline from SharePoint. SDP should work fine for organizations in most cases and may offer an improved user experience since the SPW client is gone and SDP integrates directly with Windows Explorer and functions similarly to the consumer SkyDrive client. Note that SDP can also work with SharePoint 2010 document libraries. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not provide an upgrade path to move existing document library synchronization relationships from SPW to SDP: individuals will need to manually re-sync libraries with SDP, or organizations can create scripts to automate this process on behalf of their users.
If your organization was relying on SPW for offline usage of SharePoint lists and forms, you will want to review the capabilities built into other Office client applications such as Excel, Access, and Outlook. These Office clients provide much of what SPW did for working with SharePoint lists and have additional capabilities, such as reporting, that SPW did not include.
Organizations that will feel the largest impact are those that were relying on Groove workspaces for peer-to-peer synchronization without the use of SharePoint. In these cases, your best temporary option may be to keep SPW installed side by side with SDP using the Office 365 ProPlus capabilities or other client virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft’s Application Virtualization (App-V) software, which will allow you to run multiple versions of the same product side by side. One important technical consideration is that both SPW and SDP run as the “groove.exe” process under the covers.
Documents and Data Caching
Office 2013 offers several different ways to handle document and data caching. Choosing the tool that is right for you will depend on what you need to do.
Documents
When working with documents, your primary tools are
SkyDrive Pro
Office Upload Center
Outlook 2013
Windows Explorer
SkyDrive Pro
SkyDrive Pro is the tool to use for SharePoint sites that you frequently use and/or where you want to make sure that you always have the latest copy of documents synchronized and available—even when you are not connected to the corporate network. Personal and team collaboration sites are two examples of sites that are well suited to use SDP to keep content up-to-date.
Office Upload Center
What if you only occasionally browse SharePoint sites and have trouble remembering the sites where you’ve checked out files and those where you have pending check-ins? Or maybe you’re in a remote location and have a low-bandwidth connection? Good news: Office 2013 includes an application named the Office Upload Center. When opening the Office Upload Center, you can see the documents you have most recently opened from SharePoint, manage your locally cached copies, and review and check in documents (see Figure 20-11).
Figure 20-11 The Office Upload Center is a central location for caching all SharePoint files and providing a consolidated view of all files checked out and pending upload back to SharePoint. The Office Upload Center is also used with Microsoft’s consumer SkyDrive service
You can also customize how the Office Upload Center works, how you are notified of changes that are pending or failed to upload, and the amount of disk space allocated to the file cache (see Figure 20-12).
Figure 20-12 The Office Upload Center provides a variety of settings, including how long cached files are kept and whether to show notifications
Using the Office Upload Center is the default option in Office 2013 for caching Office files on your PC. It is not required. If you want to change Office to instead use a “local server drafts folder” on your computer and have this work as it did in Office 2007, you can change that option under the Offline Editing Options for the Document Management Server Files setting within the Save options in any Office client product (Figure 20-13).
Figure 20-13 Setting Office 2013 to use Office Document Cache or a local server drafts location
Outlook 2013
Like Office 2007 and 2010, Outlook 2013 supports the ability to take documents offline. We typically discourage the use of this feature for a few reasons. First, Outlook document synchronization with SharePoint is read-only. Second, do you really want your e-mail client to be synchronizing documents as well as what it already does around your e-mails, tasks, calendars, RSS feeds, and other functions?
There is one important exception to this recommendation: Office, Exchange, and SharePoint 2013 have introduced a new Site Mailbox capability (Figure 20-14), which enables you to have a unified view of messages from Exchange and documents from SharePoint, and to drag and drop files into SharePoint from within Outlook.
Figure 20-14 Outlook 2013 integrates with the new SharePoint and Exchange 2013 Site Mailbox feature
Note
Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content,” discusses the new Site Mailbox feature in more depth.
Windows Explorer
Use Windows Explorer to quickly move files between SharePoint and other file systems (e.g., a network file share or your local PC storage) if you are not concerned about applying new SharePoint metadata (inbound transfer) or preserving existing SharePoint metadata (outbound transfer). If you use Windows Explorer to perform an initial upload of files, you can use the SharePoint interface or edit using the Quick Edit view to apply metadata. If, however, you use this function to re-upload documents, you may overwrite your metadata. Documents you download from SharePoint will retain both file property and SharePoint metadata—but only if you download them back from SharePoint after your initial upload and replace them in the source location.
SkyDrive Pro and the Office Upload Center offer richer capabilities than Windows Explorer for working with SharePoint files offline. In addition, for Office-based documents, the Backstage feature (described in greater detail later in this chapter) provides extensive capabilities for working with SharePoint while authoring the documents; this makes it easier for people to perform tasks such as managing document metadata tags, viewing other authors, and interacting with workflows.
Other Considerations: Synchronization of Office Document Changes and Branch Cache
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 made significant improvements behind the scenes in terms of how document changes are managed and synchronized between the server and your offline copy. For these scenarios, only the changes are synchronized between your PC and the server when updates are made. For example, consider a scenario where you have a copy of a 5MB Word document on your PC that has been opened from SharePoint. When someone adds a new table and saves the changes to SharePoint, the next time you open the file from the server, only what has changed will be sent to your PC. This is a major improvement that both enhances user performance and minimizes network traffic and impact.
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 added a new capability known as Windows Branch Cache. Branch Cache helps geographically distributed offices access SharePoint documents over a WAN efficiently. If this is enabled in your environment, SharePoint can take advantage of it. With Branch Cache, the first time a person in a remote office accesses a file from the remote SharePoint server, a cached copy of that file is stored on a server located in the remote (branch) office. Subsequent requests for that document within the office are fulfilled from the local branch copy of the file, saving what is often a slower network call over the WAN. Branch Cache and SharePoint work together to manage changes and to make sure that security continues to be enforced so that only people authorized in SharePoint can access the right version of the document.
SharePoint and Office 2013, as well as Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, build upon this foundation and continue to support Branch Cache.
Data Caching
Office 2013 offers a number of choices for working with SharePoint data offline. These choices include
Outlook
Access
Excel
Outlook
Outlook remains the primary option for easily taking a SharePoint calendar offline (Figure 20-15). One benefit of doing this in Outlook is that you can then compare, overlay, and update both your personal and shared calendars in the same client tool. In Outlook you can also view and edit contacts from SharePoint. Tasks can be synchronized from SharePoint to Outlook—including the new unified My Tasks view from your SharePoint 2013 personal site, which provides a single rolled-up view of all tasks assigned to you across Exchange, SharePoint, and Project (Figures 20-16, 20-17). The Outlook Social Connector allows you to surface SharePoint social updates directly within Outlook (Figure 20-18).
Figure 20-15 Outlook continues to be the best tool for taking a calendar offline from SharePoint and having read/write access. To take a calendar offline, select the Connect to Outlook option from the Calendar tab in the Calendar Tools section within the SharePoint ribbon
Figure 20-16 SharePoint 2013 can aggregate all tasks assigned to individuals across team sites, project sites, and personal tasks within Exchange
Figure 20-17 Outlook 2013 can synchronize tasks from SharePoint where they can be viewed and edited. Tasks are grouped by the site of which they are a part. Updates made in Outlook and SharePoint are synchronized automatically.
Figure 20-18 The Outlook Social Connector allows you to connect to your SharePoint newsfeed (and external social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn) to see social messages in the context of recent messages
Access and Excel
Both Access and Excel continue to offer the ability to work with SharePoint offline (Figure 20-19). For example, to quickly integrate and join SharePoint data with other data sources so you can run complex queries and reports, Access is likely your best choice. To take your SharePoint list data into a rich client where you can do advanced graphing and charting, add conditional formatting, and maybe generate a pivot table to slice and dice all of that data, Excel is probably the tool to use.
Figure 20-19 The ability to take list data offline in Excel, Access, and other Office clients can be located in the Connect and Export section of the List Tools command group within the SharePoint ribbon
Recommendations
Office and SharePoint 2013 offer a few different choices for working with documents and data. In summary:
SkyDrive Pro should be used for sites that you use often, such as collaborative team sites or your personal site, or those sites where you need to have offline access to your SharePoint documents.
Use the Office Upload Center as a one-stop shop for information and usage for all of the SharePoint files that you have viewed and checked out—regardless of which site the files originated from. This is especially useful for those sites that you access infrequently.
Outlook should be used only for working with SharePoint team data that intersects with your personal information. Calendars are one example. Tasks, contacts, and discussion boards are other examples. In general, using Outlook to synchronize document libraries is discouraged with the exception of the new Site Mailbox capability.
Windows Explorer should be used as a last resort for copying files offline if you find that working through SkyDrive Pro, the Office Upload Center, or the browser is not appropriate for your specific document management scenario.
Branch Cache in Windows Server 2008 R2 (or later) and Windows 7 (or later) is an option to help speed up SharePoint file access for remote branch offices.
Access and Excel are great solutions for creating composite mashup applications, rich data reporting, and integration with the server-side capabilities provided by Access Services and Excel Services.
Backstage
Users familiar with Office since the 2007 release are accustomed to the ribbon fluent user interface that was introduced in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and parts of Outlook (those that used Word as the editor and viewer). The ribbon was designed to address usability issues that occurred over the past 25 years as more features were added to the menus in the Office suite. Past attempts at addressing these issues included toolbars, task panes, and the character that everyone loved to hate: Clippy.
The ribbon was Microsoft’s attempt to press the reset button on the Office user interface and implement a design that addresses how we work and collaborate today. Office 2007 was designed to make features more accessible and discoverable by users of the products. The ribbon was so successful that in 2010 it was extended to other Office system applications, including SharePoint, the rest of Outlook, OneNote, InfoPath, Visio, and Project.
The Office 2007 ribbon addressed the usability issues for operations within a document such as text formatting, tables, charts, and Smart Art. In Office 2010, Microsoft sought to address things that happen outside of the document and had been a challenge to work with. For example, it was frustrating that only a limited context was provided for documents, including the inability to easily understand:
What document library is this document from?
What is the workflow status?
Who are my coauthors and what is their status?
What are my rights to perform updates and print this document?
To help answer these and many other common questions, in 2010 Microsoft introduced another Office UI innovation: the Backstage.
The Backstage replaces the old File menu and the Office “pearl” that was introduced in 2007 as the icon in the top left-hand corner of each Office product. The Backstage is launched when you click on the File menu tab in any Office client application (Figure 20-20).
Figure 20-20 Use the Backstage view to review document information, properties, related authors, version history, metadata, and notes
In the Backstage area you find all of the things that you can do to the document as a whole. You can
Assign Information Rights Management (IRM) to protect what people can do with the document
Review the document for accessibility by those with disabilities
Start or see the workflow status of the document (Figure 20-21)
Figure 20-21 Sharing documents from the Backstage. From this section you can access SharePoint sites to save to and activate related SharePoint workflows
Publish the document to a SharePoint site
Check the version history of the document
Like other parts of Office 2013, the Backstage is open and customizable. Using Visual Studio, your company and partners can create extensible applications that plug information into the Backstage from other systems, databases, and processes.
Other Clients: Office Web Apps and Office Mobile Applications
One of the main themes across the Microsoft Office system since the 2010 release is the idea of choice and flexibility in how you work with SharePoint content. In 2013, the Office Web and mobile companion applications have been updated for
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
OneNote
The vision for these four applications is that you should be able to access them in the same way you can currently access your Exchange-based e-mail across three different devices: Outlook on the PC, Outlook Web Access in the browser, and Outlook mobile (or some other e-mail client) on your phone.
One of the fundamental design goals for Office 2013 is that documents should seamlessly travel from the PC to the browser to the phone and back without concern for loss of data or formatting. This is very important since you want to be confident that regardless of which application or device was used to make changes to a document, the integrity of the document is maintained. By leveraging the Office Open XML document file formats, SharePoint is the foundation and glue behind the scenes that makes this happen.
Describing each of these applications in depth is outside the scope of this book, but you should be aware of them and factor them into your solutions plans.
Office Web Apps
Office Web Apps is not intended to replace the Office products that you use on your desktop today, just as Outlook Web Access is not a replacement for the rich functionality that Outlook provides. Rather, Office Web Apps is intended to offer you the essential viewing and editing capabilities so you can work with documents stored in SharePoint wherever you are (Figure 20-22). For example, you can now perform lightweight editing in Word, modify slides in PowerPoint, and edit formulas and spreadsheet values in Excel. Office Web Apps, like SharePoint 2013, leverage open standards and work across different browsers: Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. In general, you will want to use these applications in cases such as when you’re working on someone else’s PC, using a kiosk at a conference, or working in a hotel lobby where the Office client application is unavailable.
Figure 20-22 Editing a Word document in the Word Web application companion
Office Mobile Applications
The Office Mobile Applications for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote enable you to read and edit documents on a Windows Phone device. There is also an updated SharePoint mobile client that allows you to take SharePoint content on your phone and participate in some key tasks such as social or approving a document as part of a workflow.
What if you are not using a Windows Phone device and are using something like a BlackBerry, Android, or iPhone? Good news: SharePoint and the Office Web Apps also have micro-browser support for the most popular operating systems and browsers that run on other mobile device platforms.
Note
More information on SharePoint and Office Mobile Applications is included in Chapter 19, “Planning for Mobility.”
Key Points
In this chapter, we covered the key concepts about working with SharePoint using the Office 2013 client applications, and we touched on the updated Office Web and Mobile Applications for working with SharePoint and Office when you don’t have access to Office applications on the computer you are using. Some important things to remember include the following:
SkyDrive Pro is the best way to take SharePoint documents offline and synchronize changes.
The Office Upload Center manages the SharePoint documents that you access via the Office clients. It caches a local copy of the documents, synchronizes changes only when you access the server again, and provides a central place to review all files pending check-in regardless of which site you accessed the files from.
Outlook remains the tool to use for viewing and integrating your personal calendar with shared calendars on SharePoint, as well as working with tasks, contacts, and discussion lists. Outlook 2013 also integrates with the new Site Mailbox feature that was added to SharePoint and Exchange 2013.
Access and Excel continue to provide rich advanced support for charting, graphing, filtering, and reporting on data. Improvements have been made around Excel Services, including support for the new PowerView capabilities. Access Services has been updated with SharePoint 2013 as an option for publishing Access data and forms for centralized browser-based access.
The Backstage within the Office 2013 client applications can be launched from the File button. This is where you can clearly view the context of your document as part of SharePoint libraries, workflows, and authoring permissions and apply metadata and tagging.
The updated Office Web Apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are integrated with SharePoint and provide Read and Edit access to documents using the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari Web browsers. With the 2013 release, the on-premises Office Web Apps servers must be installed on separate servers from SharePoint 2013. Office 365 offers the Office Web Apps as an online service for customers using SharePoint Online.
Microsoft now offers Office as a service via Office 365. Organizations can subscribe to Office 365 ProPlus on a per-user basis. Capabilities such as Office on Demand, roaming settings, and Office “remembering” recent documents you have worked with work only when Office 2013 is connected to a Microsoft cloud service such as SkyDrive for consumers or Office 365 for organizations.
Office Mobile Applications for SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote provide access to your content on the go while using Windows mobile devices. Micro-browsers are also supported on many other non-Windows mobile device platforms such as BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone.