The first time I installed SharePoint, it made my head hurt. I was going through a whole lot of “newness” in my life at that point. New job (only the second one I'd ever had since college), new teammates, new responsibilities (I had been a developer in my previous life, now I was an administrator), and now this new software, SharePoint. It was hard enough coming to terms with being the enemy (as a developer I always thought that IT admins were there to thwart me, as an admin I've gleefully confirmed that), but on top of that I had to get my head around an unbelievably complex platform. But I was able to successfully install SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on my first try, and more importantly get a portal created and running without error.
When I started to dig into my new SharePoint portal and see what it was all about, I was immediately struck by something that made me a believer in its viability and long-term success: SharePoint's cohesive integration with the Office suite. It just made sense. Microsoft Office is by the far the most widely used office suite in the world, and here was a product that allowed you to store, collaborate, and search on all the documents you created with those tools. To me it was a huge selling point, and I think SharePoint's success over the years has proven that out, especially once Microsoft updated SharePoint with the WSS v3/MOSS 2007 release.
Which brings me to the point of this post: I'm introducing a new theme here at ForTheUser, “Integrating Office” which will highlight how SharePoint can be integrated with the various tools and programs found within the Office suite. Just to warn you, I'm going to try and focus more on the less talked about components and features, to try and expose you to some topics you hadn't considered before. If you're looking for how to upload a document through Word into a SharePoint site, it probably won't be here (unless you ask for it). And I'm going to be kicking things off with how you can use Microsoft's OneNote with SharePoint.
I had originally intended to do that in this post, but I went into the whole preface for this theme a little more than I expected, so I'm going to wrap it up and devote the whole post to OneNote and SharePoint.
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