VSTO For Dummies

Chapter 20. Ten Ways to Integrate SharePoint

In This Chapter

• Digging into the SharePoint object model

• Using workflows to route documents

• Discovering Excel services

Part III covers a whole lot of SharePoint, but we still have a lot more to cover. In this chapter, you find some great ideas on integrating Office and SharePoint using VSTO.

Deploy Word or Excel Files with VSTO Automation to Document Libraries

Making document customizations is one of the newest and neatest things that you can do with VSTO because you could already do add-ins with COM. Now, because document customizations follow the document, you can add them to documents you import to SharePoint document libraries, even as templates.

Think of the circular reference possibilities. The documents have code in them that call on SharePoint services that refer to the lists of documents that call on SharePoint services. This is deep stuff.

Seriously, you can do a lot with the idea of adding documents that are aware of their surroundings to a document library. For example, the document can look up what other documents are in the list where it was accessed. Another idea is to publish Excel spreadsheets that use Excel Services that have also been published to the SharePoint server — the ultimate in flexibility.

We show you how to customize a document in Chapters 3, 6, and 8. To add a document to a document library:

1. Browse to the library in question.

2. Choose Upload Document from the menu bar.

3. Pick the custom document you want to upload.

4. Click ...