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Sharepoint - More Than Just Document Storage

Published Saturday, August 2, 2008 by bloggerblognet83460 | E-mail this post

My management team decided that we were to use SharePoint for a few of its basic features a few months or so ago. Our hosted SharePoint solution was really meant to be used for document storage and task lists, which were incredibly helpful and made us more productive. It is also great when members of our team are out on the road; they have access to the same resources over the web, as they would in the office. And it is completely secure to share those documents among us.

So with how addicting it is, we've recently made use of another feature that has become incredibly addictive! While we work out of our office, occasionally we find members of our team travelling from time to time, to meet clients, vendors, etc. It makes it difficult to manage everyone's schedule, and plan for meetings when we can be going up to twelve different directions at the same time.

So we've started to use the Calendar feature of SharePoint. It was really simple at first: we just put in the days that we were unavailable or out of the office. Some of us set up alerts so that we would be notified by email when anything was added or deleted.

Seems simple, right? But what was really great, is that this calendar can integrate right into Microsoft Outlook 2007, which our entire team was already using. So, while we were scheduling our client and vendor meetings, if a meeting was already scheduled in our SharePoint calendar, we could see it, right there in Outlook! A user doesn't even have to log into the hosted SharePoint account: Outlook will even allow you to drag and drop calendar entries between your Outlook calendar and your SharePoint calendar. It makes it so much easier to coordinate all of our meetings, without the embarrassment of having to cancel and reschedule.

What makes the Calendar really easy to use is that it can also integrate with a Meeting workspace that you set up. That is my next task; to find out how useful these Meeting workspaces are for us. But one thing is for certain: our hosted SharePoint has made it not only easy to use SharePoint, but easier to work out of the office.

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