Managing Documents with SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010

Transcription

1 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways With its wide-ranging improvements in scalability, functionality and managability, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides a much stronger platform for document management solutions. Microsoft has enhanced Office 2010 to work with SharePoint However organizations that have struggled when attempting to use previous versions of SharePoint and Office for document and management are disappointed when they find that while the situation has improved, many frustrations remain. Document Management Framework ( DMF ) plugs the gaps in the integration of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 so that managing documents and s in SharePoint is both intuitive and fully functional. Over 200 organisations in more than 30 countries have licensed DMF in some cases to replace big name traditional DM systems with large volumes of documents and users. 1. Visualizing and Navigating the Document Store Business users find the DMF tree-view more intuitive than the folder tree displayed by Open in Windows Explorer Many organisations are looking to use SharePoint to replace Windows File Shares for central storage of their Office documents and other files. From an IT perspective the advantages of this use of SharePoint are clear they include richer searching, versioning and web-based access. However as business users start to use SharePoint to manage their files they typically find that the new SharePoint-based document store is much harder to visualise and navigate than the Windows File Shares that they were used to previously. Instead of seeing a hierarchy of folders they now need to go into the browser and enter URLs, click breadcrumbs, etc. DMF adds value is by providing users with an intuitive treeview of their available SharePoint document store. Tree-view of a SharePoint 2010 document store in DMF Explorer v7 note Key Filters, Metadata Navigation and Document Set Page 1

2 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways The DMF tree-view displays all areas of the SharePoint environment for which the user has permission to save and / or retrieve documents, messages and other files. The DMF tree will accurately and efficiently show document stores that span multiple Server Farms and that contain high volumes of documents organised into thousands of Site Collections, Sites, Libraries and Folders. DMF also provides a number of ways to navigate rapidly within a SharePoint document store, including Favorites, Filtering and Search Site Tree. The DMF tree-view makes working with a SharePoint document store feel familiar to users based on their experience with File Shares in Windows Explorer and private / public folders in Outlook. SharePoint 2010 structures such as Document Sets, Managed Metadata Navigation and Key Filtering are supported by DMF v7. 2. Managing s and Their Attachments You d think that it would be easier to save an to Microsoft SharePoint from Microsoft Outlook. The most frequent type of enquiry we receive is from organisations that have been trying to use SharePoint as a means of managing their messages. They find that even when they are using Outlook 2010 and SharePoint 2010 that the experience is far from user-friendly. These frustrations are much the same as with Office 2007 / SharePoint 2007: By default, messages are saved in.eml format, which means that when clicked they do not re-open in Outlook. Attachments are split off and saved separately. Saved messages are named based on their Subject and duplicate copies of an message are not prevented. DMF adds a new pane to your Outlook window that makes it much easier to manage s and their attachments in SharePoint than with standard Microsoft Outlook even Outlook DMF adds a new pane to Outlook 2010, which lets you view and save s in Microsoft SharePoint Page 2

3 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways When you click on a Document Library, Folder or Document Set in the DMF tree-view, you see your preferred View of the files stored in that area. DMF preserves Discussion Threads when you sort by Subject. When you click on a file stored in SharePoint e.g. an message you see a formatted preview of that file, without needing to open it from SharePoint. DMF also provides a convenient an intuitive interface that lets you search (with SharePoint Search or FAST Search) for s and documents stored in SharePoint, directly from Microsoft Outlook. DMF extends Microsoft Outlook to enable user friendly management and general document management in SharePoint 2010 or You can drag-and-drop to save one or multiple messages to ANY of these areas in SharePoint. As it saves, DMF will automatically record attributes (To, CC, BCC, From, Subject, Sent, Received, etc) and name the resulting MSG file so as to prevent duplicate copies of a message in any one area within SharePoint. The user is prompted for any additional metadata columns defined in the destination library. The save itself is performed in the background, so that you can continue working while the save completes. Saved messages will open back into Outlook - with their attachments preserved. You can filter to find a particular stored file and then open it or insert it as an attachment or link in a new message. 3. Searching for Documents From a document management perspective, improved search capability is one of the standout features of SharePoint Ironically though, you cannot perform a search for documents from within Office 2010 you need to go into the web browser. DMF adds value by making it easy and convenient for users to search a SharePoint document store while they work in familiar applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word. Keyword Search panel of DMF v7 on use of Open from SharePoint within Microsoft Word Page 3

4 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways DMF Search Panels are a convenient and intuitive way to search for documents in SharePoint direct from Outlook and other popular client-side applications. DMF comes with Search and Keyword Search panels that provide an intuitive interface to either SharePoint 2010 Search or FAST Search for SharePoint The DMF Search Panels facilitate searching for documents based on their content and / or metadata. You can save and re-run your searches and search results can be previewed when run from the DMF Pane in Outlook. The DMF Search Panels can be extended and configured by editing an XML definition file. In this way, an organization can readily provide its users with a document searching experience that is tailored to reflect its business requirements and metadata structure. 4. Capturing Metadata DMF captures metadata intuitively and consistently across all the applications that I am using. The ability to capture and use metadata is a key to effective document management. SharePoint 2010 has significantly improved capabilities in relation to metadata, in particular support for Managed Metadata columns based on hierarchical Term Sets. These allow organizations to satisfy a common document management need, namely the classification and retrieval of documents using a hierarchical taxonomy. Key Filters and Metadata Navigation in SharePoint 2010 enable dynamic grouping of documents that is similar to the virtual folders in a traditional DM system. DMF provides excellent support for these new Managed Metadata column types, both when saving documents to SharePoint 2010 and when navigating the SharePoint 2010 document store. With DMF the user experience when capturing metadata is consistent across Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Reader/Acrobat and Windows. DMF v7 prompting for an Industry metadata column based on a hierarchical Term Set. Other ways in which DMF v7 adds value in the area of metadata handling include: Automatic capture of metadata when saving Outlook s User-level default values of metadata columns ( Office should default to New York when I am saving... ) More intuitive user interface for Business Data column types. Page 4

5 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways 5. Moving and Copying Documents When you use the new SharePoint 2010 ribbon to open a document library in Windows Explorer, you can drag and drop to move a document to another library in the same site existing metadata and version history will be preserved. If the destination Library requires additional metadata, the newly-moved document will be left Checked-Out. DMF adds value by enabling you to drag and drop to move or copy a document to ANY other Library even one located on a different Site Collection or Web Application. The intuitive tree-view provided by DMF (see 1, above) makes it easy to visualise the overall structure of the SharePoint document store and to navigate to the desired destination Library. As it moves a document DMF will preserve any existing version history. DMF will display its profiling dialog during both moves and copies to show any existing metadata that can be re-used and to prompt for any additional metadata that is relevant in the destination library. The extra move and copy functionality of DMF is particularly useful in organizations that are hosting Extranet sites on a separate SharePoint server located in the DMZ. Compared to the out-of-the-box web browser interface of SharePoint, DMF makes it much easier to move and copy files between the Extranet and the Intranet. 6. Working with Documents While You Are Offline The ability to access and collaborate on documents while you are offline i.e. not connected to the SharePoint server is an important document management requirement for some users. The SharePoint Workspace capability that is available if you have Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus is designed to address this need. DMF v7 makes it very easy to access this new offline functionality including while you are working in Microsoft Office Clicking File, SharePoint Open brings up the DMF tree-view display. You then simply right-click on a Document Library or Site in the DMF treeview and choose Connect to SharePoint Workspace. If you do not yet have Office 2010 Professional Plus, DMF still assists in taking documents offline for editing, and subsequently reloading the edited documents back to their original Document Libraries in the SharePoint document store. 7. Saving PDFs to SharePoint Direct from Adobe Reader or Acrobat You open a PDF in Adobe Reader, but you can t then save that PDF straight to SharePoint. PDFs are used extremely widely and often in conjunction with Microsoft Office e.g. as attachments to s. However you cannot save PDFs to SharePoint directly from out-of-the-box Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Professional. Instead you need to save the PDF to a folder on a local drive or file share and then go into the web browser and upload to SharePoint (and ideally then delete the temporary copy of the PDF). When you license DMF you also receive PDF SharePoint Save a plug-in for Adobe Reader or Acrobat that makes the user experience when saving a PDF to SharePoint direct from these Adobe products the same as saving to when using DMF to save to SharePoint from Microsoft Office. The intuitive DMF tree-view displays to help you visualise and navigate the SharePoint document store and the familiar DMF profiling dialog displays to capture metadata. Being based on DMF also means that you can save your PDFs to very large document stores. Page 5

6 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways PDF SharePoint Save not only helps when you are saving a PDF to SharePoint for the first time it also streamlines re-saving back to SharePoint of PDFs that you have opened from a Document Library. That source library is automatically selected in the DMF tree-view; you are prompted to replace or create a new version (same as when saving from Word 2010) and existing metadata is displayed so that you update it if appropriate. These features make PDF SharePoint Save popular with organisations where workflow processes are based around PDFs. 8. Unique Document Numbering I don t just want to know that my documents have been assigned a unique ID I also want that ID to be displayed in the footers of those documents. Assigning a unique number to documents as they are saved is another way in which the document management capabilities of SharePoint 2010 have improved compared to previous versions of SharePoint. However SharePoint s unique document numbering still falls short of what many users expect, especially if they have experienced a traditional DM system such as Autonomy / imanage or Open Text / Hummingbird DM. This requirement gap is closed by Unique Document Numbering an optional module that is available for DMF. UDN improves the integration between SharePoint and Microsoft Office so that unique Document IDs (and other reference metadata such as current Version Number) are automatically displayed in the footers of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that are opened from SharePoint just as they would be in Office documents opened from a traditional DM system. UDN supports multiple Document Reference configurations where a Document Reference is the combination of metadata to be displayed in the footer of a document that is opened from a SharePoint Library. These configurations are stored centrally, which ensures compliance with standards. The operation of UDN can readily be configured e.g. so that Document Reference details are displayed in the footers of all pages, only first page, only last page, etc. Document Reference in the footer of a Word document showing Document Library Title, Document ID and current Version Number UDN can also add value with its Unique Numbering Provider, which is designed to replace the unique numbering provider that ships with SharePoint Advantages of the provider include: Multiple numbering schemes can exist in a single Site Collection Numbering across a Web Application, not just a Site Collection Offsets allow numbering to continue on from a previous system 9. Document Level Security As a Contribute-level user I can save and edit files but I cannot set document-level security for those files. SharePoint 2010 supports document-level security, but only for users with Full Control permission level. In a typical SharePoint document management deployment most users needing to save and edit documents will be assigned the Contribute permission level. Contributor level users are frustrated that they need to ask a power user to set document-level permissions for a document, even though they have saved and edited the document themselves. Page 6

7 DMF Adds Value in 10 Ways Enhanced Document Level Security is an optional module available for DMF that enables users with Contribute-level permission to easily set permissions for a document. As the document is saved the user simply checks a Secure Document metadata column, which triggers EDLS to set permissions so that only the current user and nominated Authors have any rights to the document. The user nominates the Author or Authors by selecting values in a Person-Group column in the Library. This is a very convenient option for a Secretary or Assistant who is saving a sensitive document on behalf of a Manager or Executive. By simply checking Secure Document, a Contribute-level user can set document-level permissions 10. Migration and Deployment DMF v7 extends and enhances the integration between Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 so that users have a much improved experience and additional functionality when managing their documents and in SharePoint. Unfortunately many organisations cannot jump straight to having Office 2010 deployed to all their users. Upgrading the central servers to run SharePoint 2010 is relatively easy to manage, but upgrading desktops across a large geographically dispersed organisation can take some time. In such situations DMF provides a very significant advantage because it allows users of Office 2007 and even Office 2003 to enjoy the improved document management capabilities of SharePoint Thanks to DMF, users can be managing documents effectively even before they are upgraded to Office The DMF tree-view supports both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 servers. As a result a user can see both the old MOSS and new 2010 servers in the same DMF tree. If they need to they can copy documents between these servers DMF will retain metadata. For more information about solutions for SharePoint and Office, contact: Business Technology P/L ACN ABN Level 12, 171 Clarence Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia T: F: E: sales@macroview.com.au DMFAddsValue10Ways.docx Effective December 2010 Page 7