SharePoint Server 2007 Unleashed

In the Marketing Communications library, click Actions and choose Connect to Outlook. The document library will appear in your Outlook folder hierarchy and will be synchronized based on your Send/Receive settings. Figure 6 shows the uploaded brochure within Outlook—Outlook made it available offline automatically.

Experience 7: Slide Libraries
Give this experience a try if you have access to PowerPoint 2007. From the Communications home page, select Site Actions, Create. This time, choose Slide Library and give the library a name. I chose "WINDOMAIN.com slides," but it would be wiser to keep names restricted to alphanumeric characters and spaces because SharePoint Server deletes periods.

In PowerPoint, create a presentation with several slides and save it. Then, in the slide library, click Upload and choose Publish Slides (you can also publish from the Office menu in PowerPoint). You'll be asked which presentation to publish, and you'll be given the chance to select specific slides. When you're done, refresh the slide library, select one or more slides, then click Copy Slide to Presentation. SharePoint launches PowerPoint and creates a presentation with the selected slides.

Can you imagine how happy your communications team will be to create "standard" slides that can be reused, instead of reinvented, and can be managed (updated and deleted) centrally? This might be the best thing to ever happen to PowerPoint. My clients' dreams of consistent communications might actually begin to come true.

Experience SharePoint
Many of my clients are IT organizations that need to know what "low-hanging fruit" can be picked with SharePoint Server. I hope the experiences I've led you through so far will give you something to show your management or other stakeholders in your organization and will give you the confidence and interest to approach SharePoint Server yourself and get acclimated to its capabilities.