I have just been told that I have to use the group MS Sharepoint site to work on a project. I am a die-hard Mac person and I don’t own a MS PC. I have to work from home. I did some quick googling and found that a) everyone is still waiting and hoping for true compatibility, b) in principle anyone with MS Office 11 on a Mac installed has all the connectivity one needs, c) there are several solutions discussed online that imply to me that most business Sharepoint sites are quite customized and need unique access tools.
What is the Straight Dope? Do I have a reasonable chance of accessing a Sharepoint server from a Mac or should I plan on telling the project lead to get in the habit of emailing me lots of files.
Does anyone have experience doing this? What questions should I ask and what information should I be prepared to provide?
i have never utilized sharepoint, so i’m lame in that aspect. however … working cross-platform is in my blood.
you might try keeping file-names short … hot-keys sometimes differ … shortcuts are not always spot-on … fonts can sometimes be problematic (incompatibilities 'n corruption). and, of course, work with a “copy” of a document … in case you lose connection. on a personal level, i prefer firefox over the other browsers … but, in the corporate world, sometimes mie is the pro-active choice.
no matter who sends you the files, or where you download them from … always scan with two or three different types of utilities. as for the anti-virus and other sentries you implement … make sure you update the reference-files daily. never “store” passwords in the browser or other software … generate a solid password and change it monthly … password-managers are a great option. retain one email address for business and one for personal.
here’s a couple add’l web-pages which may offer additional insight:
I use Sharepoint with a Mac every day. Other than the fact that the plugin that lets you sync a local folder with a sharepoint directory is PC only, everything works just fine.
ETA: for that matter, when I actually worked at Microsoft, I was responsible for deploying Sharepoint sites for the departments within my division. And I did all that from my Mac back then too.
Thanks for the replies!
Pork Rind says it just works. That is comforting.
Are there any plugins/extensions/tools I should plan on using?
Any tweaks I can suggest to the sharepoint admin if I have problems?
According to the research I have done so far, there is a part of Office 365 that runs on my Mac, installed by Office 11, that contains the code using sharepoint. Are there any configurations needed for that?
And last but not least, may I PM Pork Rind if I have troubles?
Feel free to PM anytime! Although I’m traveling for work the next week and a half so responses may not be the fastest. I’ll do what I can.
Now, that said, I don’t know what version of share point your team is running. I’ve had experience with the last several versions, but my frame of thinking is mostly centered around whatever is the newest one. And I can tell you that I don’t need any plug-ins, no installations no nothing. It even works on a ‘spare’ Mac I have that does not have Office installed. You can edit Office docs in the browser if you like.
For sanity sake, I would upgrade to Office 16 though first. I’m not sure how the check in check out functionality works on an older version of office for the Mac.
The only thing that doesn’t work for me on my Mac is opening a library in Explorer (rather, Finder), which makes it cumbersome to move around a lot of files.
From my reading to date and your comments, I don’t expect any problems. I will be a light user of Sharepoint and don’t expect to move lots of files.
I gather from my reading that the app I use to access sharepoint is a browser, is that right? The admin gives me a URL, username and password and I am good to go.
I understand that I will need to ask about the Sharepoint version.
As to upgrading my Office, I just discovered that I can still purchase a stand-alone version of the latest Office. MS pushes the cloud-based version of course, but I am really hesitant to do that. That is a discussion for another thread.
SharePoint is MS’s product in the “canned corporate intranet website” market. It can be used as a propaganda and social tool, a document repository with sharing, versioning, etc., and a host of small departmental workflow helpers.
For 99% of that all you need is a browser.
They have, naturally, also built in some integration points with the Office desktop client. Like opening and saving docs to/from SharePoint from within, e.g. Word, with automatic checkin/checkout. Likewise, as Balthisar says, there’s integration with Windows Explorer so it can expose a SharePoint “site” (subsection of the overall website) as more or less a network drive. Another feature is that SharePoint has database-like tables they call “lists”. Which can be worked on via browser, via Access as a pseudo-table, or via Excel as a pseudo-spreadsheet.
All that integration is about 95% nice to have. It only becomes that 5% need to have if your enterprise has done things like created business process macros that assume they’re living on a PC version of Word / Excel / etc., not a Mac version of the same app.
Even then, the more up to date your client software is, the fewer differences there are between PC & Mac.
This ought to be a almost entirely a non-event for you.