eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Office 2007 Collaboration Tools

Outlook 2007 now aggregates and synchronizes tasks from other Office applications, including OneNote 2007, Access 2007, Project 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

An Outlook 2007 user can send a message showing his or her availability via e-mail and has the ability to define the types of details sent in the message.

The message renders the calendar data in the message body and also includes an iCal file for importing into a calendar application.

Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 can also pass meeting details to OneNote 2007. This functionality will help users who rely on OneNote to capture meeting minutes and tasks.

Groove 2007 competes with OneNote 2007 as a meeting management tool, as it can also be used to take meeting minutes and log action items.

With Groove 2007 users can create and share their own forms-driven applications.

One of Groove 2007s most interesting applications is as a tool to keep data synchronized across a single users different PCs.

The peer-to-peer network that drives Groove 2007s synchronization engine is a public network, but companies can create their own network within the firewall.

When users share a document through SharePoint, the Office menu button exposes the document workflow capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007.

As part of a document workflow, a user can reassign tasks–just as they would on the SharePoint site–from within the application.

From within Word 2007 we could access the four predefined SharePoint document workflow options.

After a workflow was chosen, Word 2007 presented, in an embedded form, the same workflow options available on the SharePoint site.