You can still do things 'the old way' whilst benefiting from all the security of Sharepoint...

If there's one thing that puts business users off getting involved in a new way of managing their data or work-flow, it's the prospect of learning the ins and outs of yet another dynamic, database-driven solution. One has to sympathise - after ten or twenty years of Powerpoint presentations about the 'latest way' of doing business, it's unsurprising if the experienced business-person can become a little jaded.

That's why I continue to be impressed by how aware the Microsoft Sharepoint developers seem to have been regarding this type of resistance - and how determined to let the end-user keep their traditional ways of passing information. In last week's post I took a cursory look at how it's possible to have Excel documents 'living' in your own version of Outlook, but when I came across this post at a Microsoft blog, I realised the real advantages of keeping Sharepoint documents available in Outlook.

Sure, you can list shared documents in your Outlook - but how useful are they? Are they just a link to a secured interface? As Ethan Yarbrough points out, that's far from the case. A Sharepoint shared document in Outlook can, for instance, be forwarded to someone outside of your Sharepoint group in the same way you forward anything else in Outlook: right-click > forward. No need to log into Sharepoint and navigate to where the protected document is - if the shared document is listed in Outlook and you make the decision to release the document 'into the wild', Sharepoint respects that decision without further ado, and lets you do what you need to do with the information.

As is pointed out in the original post, the SharePoint Outlook Connector "adds a whole new dimension to the document storage capabilities of SharePoint and turns it into a content sharing, knowledge discovery tool".