Integrating with Outlook 2007

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Overview

Organizations should be able to use the capabilities covered in this article to start their migration or planning of their migration from Public Folders and shared mailboxes for the items covered in this article.  With MOSS Microsoft has extended the collaboration capability of SharePoint to tie into the most common collaboration tool used by users, Outlook.  This support should help further justify SharePoint as a replacement for file shares, attachments in e-mail, shared mailboxes, and public folders in many cases.

Linking SharePoint to Outlook 2007
As indicated by the title of this article, these features are only available with Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.  Starting with Office 2007 Microsoft has provided direct integration between the Office client and server.  This integration should help organizations to collaborate more effectively.  In addition, these features should assist in the migration away from using Public Folders in Exchange for some of the areas covered below.

Calendars
Shared, public folder based, calendars are commonly used in many organizations and the support in SharePoint 2007 should make it easy to transition users away from Public Folders.  This support included e-mail based acceptance of meetings, web access, alerting when items change, access control\permissions, workflow, custom fields, versioning support, and more.

Mail enabling a calendar

1. Create a calendar list, or navigate to an existing one

• If creating a new calendar select No under "Incoming E-mail" option, for now.  In the future you can select Yes but doing so here doesn’t prompt for all of the configuration options.

2. Enabled incoming mail on the MOSS server

• By default incoming SMTP mail is not enabled under the central operation configuration section of SharePoint.
• Without allowing incoming mail, no lists in SharePoint can be mail enabled, which is needed to provide e-mail based appointment acceptance for a shared calendar.
• These steps requires configuring SMTP on the server hosting SharePoint, configuring MX records for the server, and setting up correct routing so e-mails from the internal e-mail system for your organization route to the SharePoint server.

a)       See the steps in this Microsoft TechNet article.

3. Enable incoming mail for the calendar list

 

a)      Select List Settings from the Settings pull-down menu for the calendar

b)      Under the Communications column choose "Incoming e-mail settings"

c)      Check Yes under "Incoming E-Mail"

d)      Enter the prefix for the e-mail address for the shared calendar

• When the list is mail enabled a contact will be created in the Active Directory.  This contact can be given additional e-mail addresses, so users can send mail to Sales-Calendar@company.com instead of Sales-Calendar@spserver.company.com, for example.

e)      If do not you want the calendar to "Save attachments" sent to the above e-mail address select No

• In general I would suggest setting this on No so large attachment don’t waste space in SharePoint.  In addition, users should be trained to send out URL to documents stored in SharePoint instead of attaching them to e-mail messages.  Finally, by removing attachments sensitive documents won’t be posted to a shared location.

f)     If you want the shared calendar to only accept appointment from people with contributor access choose "Accept e-mail messages based on list permissions"

• This requires that the users who send appointment are in the same AD forest as the SharePoint server.  Otherwise SharePoint will not be able to match the sender’s e-mail address to an AD account, which is needed to check to see if the sender has the required permissions or not.
• If the calendar read permissions are set to anonymous and you want users outside of your AD forest to send appointments to it, you must choose the "any sender" option.

 

Adding items to the shared calendar

Items can now be added to the calendar in three ways.

 

1) E-mailed invitations

a) Create an appointment in Outlook

• If you are viewing your calendar in Outlook make sure you have your personal calendar tab, "Calendar" selected.

b) Click Invite Attendees

c) Type in the e-mail address of the calendar or select it from the GAL

• The contact object created by SharePoint for the shared calendar will be visible in the GAL by default.  But due to AD replication latency, Offline Address Book generation delays, and cached mode Outlook clients, it may not show up in the GAL for awhile.  By default the OAB is only generated once a day and cached mode client used the OAB for their GAL, so they won’t see new object until the new OAB has been generated and downloaded.

d) Set any other options as you normally would and click Send

• This will send the appointment invite to SharePoint, which will automatically accept the appointment.  The appointment will also show up on your calendar.
• SharePoint calendars do not support advanced rules, like prevention of meeting conflicts, meeting size, etc, so they should not be used for rooms or equipment.  The Auto Accept Agent for Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 natively provides these capabilities for shared mailboxes, or resource mailboxes.

e) After a few minutes navigate to the SharePoint calendar and confirm the appointment shows up

f) In Outlook hit F9 to force a full synchronization of all items

• By default SharePoint list in Outlook are only synchronized every 30 minutes.

g) Goto the shared calendar in Outlook and view the new appointment

2) Direct booking in Outlook

a) Select the Calendar tab in Outlook

b) Click the shared calendar tab to make it the current calendar

• If it is not shown click the check box next to it under "Other Calendars."

c) Click New to create a new appointment

• The options show for this meeting invite will be different than those shown for a normal appointment, for example there is no Invite button.

d) Set the meeting options and click Save & Close

e) Hit F9 to force a full synchronization of all items

f) Navigate to the calendar in SharePoint and confirm the appointment shows up

3) Share an Event 

4) Direct booking in SharePoint

a) Navigate to the calendar in SharePoint

b) Click New to create a new appointment

c) Set the desired options and click OK

d) Hit F9 to force a full synchronization of all items

e) Select Calendar tab in Outlook

f) Click the shared calendar tab

g) Confirm the appointment shows up