Download this Solution Accelerator

Click here to get the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint from the Microsoft Download Center

About This Solution Accelerator

The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint is intended to help address an organization's ability to communicate with external business partners across the Internet using Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 or Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server 2007. It consists of software and guidance that will help you to deploy a customizable solution that teams can use to collaborate securely with partners outside the firewall. The toolkit’s familiar SharePoint interface makes the solution easy for project team members to understand and use.

Included in the Download

This Solution Accelerator includes the following components:

External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. This software helps administrators quickly deploy a SharePoint-based solution for collaborating across the Internet.

Choosing an External Collaboration Solution. This document examines various external collaboration scenarios and provides recommendations for addressing them using Microsoft technologies.

Planning for External Collaboration with SharePoint. This document describes the planning process for deploying the solution in a small or mid-sized environment.

Deployment and Operations Guide. This guide explains how to install and configure the solution, provides guidance for users, and describes how to deploy the solution in larger environments.

Informational Materials. These include supplementary materials that explain how the guidance and tools in this Solution Accelerator can benefit your organization.

In More Detail

Microsoft is committed to helping its customers’ collaborative efforts by providing tools and products that can address the needs of a variety of collaboration scenarios. This Solution Accelerator is intended to help you choose which Microsoft collaboration option is appropriate for your organization, given your specific requirements. This solution briefly examines real-time collaboration options but primarily focuses on those solutions that provide the features and functionality that are important for long term projects. These features include document storage, workflows, and version control.

Real-time Collaboration Options

Microsoft provides a variety of products to help organizations collaborate with a few partners in real-time. These products include:

Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007
Microsoft Office Communicator 2007

Office Live Meeting 2007

Office Live Meeting 2007 is a hosted Web conferencing service to connect groups of people for online meetings, training, and events. With meeting attendees participating from their own computers, you can deliver a presentation, kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards, and negotiate deals without travel.

For more information, see the Microsoft Office Live Meeting site.

Office Communicator 2007

Office Communicator 2007 is a unified communications client that helps people be more productive by enabling them to communicate easily and instantly with others in different locations or time zones using a range of different communication options, including instant messaging (IM), voice, and video. Integration with programs across the 2007 Microsoft Office system gives information workers many different ways to communicate with each other via a consistent and simple user experience.

For more information, see the Microsoft Office Communicator site.

Collaboration Options That Include Document Storage

Many collaboration scenarios require the capability for a large number of people to communicate with each other and also the ability for them to work on and view a number of documents. Collaboration solutions that scale efficiently to large numbers of users and that provide document storage capabilities include:

Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Microsoft Office Groove™ 2007
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

Office Live Workspace

Office Live Workspace provides basic document collaboration capabilities for individual users and small organizations. You can use Office Live Workspace to collaborate on Web-based documents, notes, spreadsheets, presentations, and lists. For more information, see the Office Live Workspace site.

Office Groove 2007

Office Groove 2007 is a collaboration tool included in the 2007 Microsoft Office system that enables teams to collaborate even when team members work for different organizations, work remotely, or need to work offline. Office Groove provides a dynamic collaboration environment that works best for short-term projects with concrete deadlines, such as a product launch or bid preparation.

Office Groove 2007 is the client software that enables individuals to work as teams within virtual workspaces to accomplish collaborative tasks. Individuals can form a team by creating workspaces, adding tools and data, and inviting other Office Groove users to join the workspace as team members. Project team members can use the workspace to store and update documents, presentations, and other essential information.

An Office Groove 2007 workspace doesn't reside on a server. Instead, every team member has an identical copy of the workspace on their desktop. When someone makes a change, Office Groove automatically distributes it to the other team members, keeping everyone's information synchronized. This locally stored workspace content enables project team members to view and update documents even when they don't have Internet or network access.

Even if connectivity is available but slow, Office Groove 2007 is a good choice for collaboration because its synchronization engine distributes only file changes rather than whole files. If a colleague edits one label on a 10 MB blueprint, for example, Office Groove will send just the few altered bytes instead of the entire massive file.

Use of Office Groove 2007 requires each team member to have Office Groove installed on their computer before they can begin to collaborate together.

For more information, see the Office Groove site.

SharePoint Products and Technologies

SharePoint Products and Technologies comprise a large set of technologies with a wide range of uses. Windows SharePoint Services is the technology available for Windows Server that provides the infrastructure for collaboration. Office SharePoint Server 2007 relies on the Windows SharePoint Services technology to provide powerful search features, sophisticated content management functionality, and advanced business intelligence capabilities. These features make Office SharePoint Server 2007 an ideal tool for building rich intranet and extranet sites. Both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization.

Like Office Groove 2007, SharePoint Products and Technologies help project teams manage documents and other information centrally. However, they also include robust workflow capabilities for managing structured business processes, such as expense report approvals and document reviews. In addition, SharePoint offers the ability to make documents and information available to large groups of people, and, unlike Groove, does not require the installation of client software (beyond a typical Web browser).

Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.

Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment. With a familiar, Web-based interface and close integration with everyday tools including the Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Services is easy to use and can be deployed rapidly.

Additionally, there are two different ways to use SharePoint in your organization: hosted by a third party, or self-hosted. Third party companies can host SharePoint sites for your business so that your organization does not have to undertake the complexity of deploying and managing the SharePoint services. The alternative is to deploy SharePoint and the related services in your own network.

SharePoint Sites Integrated with Office Groove 2007

Sometimes, organizations need the secure offline capabilities of Office Groove 2007 and the online capabilities of a SharePoint site. In this case, you can connect an Office Groove workspace to a SharePoint document library. Thereafter, if someone adds or edits a file in the SharePoint site, the changes appear in Office Groove, and vice versa. SharePoint and Groove integration extends the ability to maintain a SharePoint document library content from either Groove or SharePoint and beyond organization boundaries without breaking either security model.

You can use a similar approach to link field teams with the head office. For example, an insurance company can create a SharePoint site for its claims inspectors at headquarters, and include it in an Office Groove 2007 workspace that its mobile claims adjustors use. As adjustors complete claim forms on their laptops during the day, they can store them in Office Groove. When they reconnect with the Internet, Office Groove automatically uploads those forms to the SharePoint site for claims inspectors to review.

Third Party–hosted SharePoint

Using SharePoint hosted by a third party solution provider is an option that allows organizations to use SharePoint while avoiding the infrastructure impact of establishing SharePoint using your own organization’s resources and network. Because the characteristics of a third party–hosted SharePoint solution can vary, you should compare your specific requirements with the functionality offered by different service providers.

Related Resources

The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint source code is available on CodePlex. The source code can be found on the Community Kit for SharePoint site on CodePlex.
If you are interested in our toolkit, you might also be interested in the Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007 from SharePoint Solutions. You can learn more at the SharePoint Solutions site.
If you have questions or comments about the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint, post them on the SharePoint – Collaboration Forum.
See other Solution Accelerators that focus on communication and collaboration at the Communication and Collaboration site on Microsoft TechNet.
For more information about all of the Microsoft Solution Accelerators, see the Solution Accelerators site on Microsoft TechNet.

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About Solution Accelerators

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Download this Solution Accelerator

Click here to get the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint from the Microsoft Download Center