SharePoint 2010 : The Basics of Saving a Word Document to a SharePoint Document Library

Using Office 2007 Applications with SharePoint 2010

Microsoft offers a thorough guide on this topic, with 41 pages dedicated to the various versions of Office and the level of integration provided with SharePoint 2010: “SharePoint_2010_and_Office_2010_Business_Productivity_at_its_Best_Whitepaper.docx.” This guide offers a detailed comparison of the user experience when Office 2007 products are used with SharePoint 2010 and when Office 2010 products are used with SharePoint 2010.

The following is a partial list from that white paper of the features that users won’t get if using Office 2007 with SharePoint 2010. IT should find this useful to help determine whether any of these features would justify or help justify and upgrade to Office 2010 products.

Features available only with Office 2010 applications and SharePoint 2010 include the following:

• Coauthor documents and presentations— Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 offer the coauthoring capability that allows multiple people to work on one of these documents at the same time. Note that this is different from the ability in Office web applications to have multiple users work on the same spreadsheet at the same time.

• Simultaneously edit spreadsheets and notebooks— Excel 2010 and OneNote 2010 documents can be edited by multiple people simultaneously. Excel 2010 takes advantage of Excel Services and Office web apps, whereas OneNote provides this functionality natively and doesn’t require Office web apps.

• Broadcast slide shows in PowerPoint 2010— Another feature offered by Office web apps, this takes advantage of a SharePoint 2010 broadcast site, which is automatically created by Office web apps, which allows users to view a PowerPoint slide show without having PowerPoint on their desktops or using LiveMeeting, WebEx, or similar technology.

• Office Backstage view— This is available in Office 2010 applications when a user clicks the File tab and has access to the Backstage tools. This File tab is functionally the replacement for the Microsoft Office button.

• Access SharePoint templates— The New Document Wizard in Office 2010 applications enables users to select SharePoint templates that have been used previously.

• Apply PowerPoint templates to SharePoint sites— PowerPoint themes can be applied to SharePoint sites for basic customization and branding.

The following features are partially supported with Office 2007 applications:

• Office Backstage view with Excel 2010— This allows for selective publication of parts of a worksheet, to hide formulas, and “stage” data to SharePoint 2010. This can be done in Excel 2007, but the process is less intuitive.

• Integration with Groove and SharePoint Workspace products— SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the new version of the Groove product and provides powerful features for mobile workers, but Groove 2007 users will still have the ability to work offline with SharePoint 2010 document libraries.

The Basics of Saving a Word Document to a SharePoint Document Library

Users and administrators alike will want to become very familiar with the process of using Word in conjunction with SharePoint 2010 document libraries.

In this example, the user has created a new document from a SharePoint 2010 document library and then accessed the File tab on the Ribbon to access Backstage. This document library has had several columns added to it that will be reviewed in the following steps.

Follow these steps to explore the capabilities of Backstage in more detail:

1.	Click the new document from a document library that has had one or more choice columns added, and one or more managed metadata columns added. The assumption is that the document library uses a Word template.
2.	When the new document opens, click Enable Editing if needed.
3.	Enter some text in the document.
4.	Click the File tab to access Backstage, which will default to the Info tab, and click the Show All Properties link in the lower-right corner. The results will look similar to Figure 1. The user has the option to enter metadata from the File tab or from the standard editing view of the document. Figure 1. File tab showing the Backstage tools in Word 2010.
5.	In this case, the user prefers to enter metadata from the regular editing view, so she accesses the drop-down menu titled Properties from the File tab and clicks Show Document Panel, and the Home tab opens, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. Populating the metadata fields in the Document Properties fields.
6.	The user now enters data into the various metadata fields. In this example, those are Title (a default metadata field), Type of Document (a choice column added to the document library), Document Owner (a person or group column added to the library), Document Status (a choice column added to the document library), and Project (a managed metadata column added to the document library).
7.	In this example, when the user clicks the Type of Document drop-down menu, a message appears that informs the user “AutoComplete remembers entries in Document Information Panel and Web Forms.... Do you want to turn Autocomplete on?” She clicks Yes. This will make previously entered text available as suggestions for this and future documents.
8.	She makes choices from the Type of Document drop-down, enters her own account as Document Owner, sets the Document Status at Draft, and then in the Project field, she starts typing the word Project and she is given options for the managed metadata values available to choose from, as also shown in Figure 25.2. She chooses Project MNO. Tip Depending upon the configuration of the managed metadata group, as well as the configuration of the managed metadata column, a user might be able to add values to the group from within the Office 2010 application. To try this from Word 2010, access the File tab, and click the icon next to the Managed Metadata field in the Properties section on the right side of the page (the property is Project in this example). The Select window opens, as shown in Figure 3. Then click Add New Item and enter the new term. For this to be functional, the term set Submission Policy must be set as Open in the Managed Metadata service application, and the column in the document library must have the Allow Fill-in setting set to Yes. Figure 3. Adding a managed metadata entry from the File tab.
9.	She then wants to save her work, so clicks the Save button.
10.	The Save As window opens to the SharePoint document library where the document was created, and she enters a title and clicks Save.

Working with Backstage in Word 2010

Microsoft has repositioned the Office button and simply made it a part of the Ribbon interface, where it is now the File tab. The File tab now gives access to the Backstage page, which provides a number of tools: Save, Save As, Open, Close, Information, Recent, New, Print, Save & Send, Help, Options, and Exit. This section briefly summarizes the tools that pertain to SharePoint connectivity to help administrators and power users get a sense of how these will affect the user experience.

A brief walk-through of the Info tab is as follows:

• Protect Document drop-down menu offers a variety of tools— Mark as Final, Encrypt with Password, Restrict Editing, Restrict Permissions by People, and Add a Digital Signature. Mark as Final, Encrypt with Password, and Restrict Editing are available without additional software, but Restrict Permissions by People requires Microsoft Information Rights Management Server, and Add a Digital Signature requires Digital Signature Services. The Mark as Final tool sets the status property to Final, and typing, editing commands, and proofing marks are turned off. Users will still be able to edit the document at a future date; they just have to click the Edit Anyway button that appears under the Ribbon when the document opens.

• Check for Issues menu offers three tools— Provides the Inspect Document, Check Accessibility, and Check Compatibility tools. The Inspect Document tool checks for hidden properties or hidden information, whereas Check Accessibility looks for content that might be hard for a person with disabilities to read, and Check Compatibility checks for features not supported by earlier versions of Word. Check Compatibility will prove especially useful in environments that support multiple different versions of Office products.

• Manage Versions offers up to five tools (depending on whether versioning is configured in the library that houses the document, and whether major versioning only or major and minor versioning are configured)— These tools are Refresh Server Versions List, Check Out, Compare with Major Version, Compare with Last Version, and Recover Unsaved Documents. The Compare with Major Version and Compare with Last Version are extremely handy tools to have, and give the user a quick way to see recent changes in the document.

Additional tools that connect the Word document to the SharePoint document library can be found on the Save & Send menu. The Save & Send menu provides the Save to SharePoint tool and the Workflows section, which lists any workflows available to the document editor. The user can start a workflow listed here and then provide additional information required by the workflow.

Accessing SharePoint Templates from Word 2010

Word 2010 offers the new capability to select a template that lives in a SharePoint document library to create a document. The user must have already created a new document in a document library, which will download the template to their system, and then make the template available in Word 2010. Follow these steps to test the process:

1.	Visit a SharePoint document library using an account that has contributor-level privileges. This assumes that the system has Office 2010 installed, and that the template for the document library is based on a Word document.
2.	Click New Document from the Documents tab. Click OK to the warning message if needed, and Word will start using the document library template.
3.	Enter some text, click Save from the File tab, and the Save As window opens.
4.	Enter a document title and click Save.
5.	Click the File tab, and click the New menu.
6.	In the SharePoint Templates section under Available Templates, the template from the new document library should appear, as shown in Figure 4. Figure 4. Choosing a template from a SharePoint document library in Word 2010.
7.	Click the desired template, and then double-click the template icon. The template will have the metadata fields associated with the document library available.