SharePoint and Office 14 for web

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).

Watch out for metadata!

Metadata is a great feature for easy retrieval of files in any document management system, not only in SharePoint. But sometimes people forget that in some cases, the metadata is stored in the file itself, not only in the repository.

This can lead to painful situations, as Microsoft experienced recently with their new “I’m a PC” ads.

If you are storing Office files on SharePoint, the same thing happens: metadata such as SharePoint columns or content type info gets stored in the file itself.

If you are using Office 2007, you can use the Inspect Document function to search for hidden metadata, and strip this from the document. This screencast shows you how SharePoint metadata remains in a Word document, and how you can use Inspect Document to remove the metadata.

Groove sync error with SharePoint

Today, a colleague had an interesting issue with Groove and SharePoint: he had synced a document library to a Groove workspace, but when he created a new folder in Groove, syncing with SharePoint failed with an error indicating that the folder already existed. The actual error was “Synchronization completed with errors”, and the detail: “The file “Shared%20Documents/xxx” could not be located: It may have been deleted, renamed, or moved.”

It took me a while to figure this out, but it has something to do with the default document library view in the SharePoint library. If this one has the option activated to hide folders (Show Items without folders), syncing with Groove fails. If you turn the folders back on in SharePoint, all goes well. Life is easy, isn’t it? Have a look at the screencast below for more info.