Publishing, Sharing And Searching PowerPoint Files in SharePoint

Update: Retrieved from a web archive. Please send an email to share.point@yahoo.com if you find any deadlinks on this page. Thank you. Reposted on: Aug 30, 2007 --- Update 2: Because of the blog template, all article text is not visible on this page. If you have any problems viewing the complete article here, please read the article here. Publishing PowerPoint slides in SharePoint Here is what you will learn in this article: 1. Publishing PowerPoint files in SharePoint. 2. Synchronizing files. 3. Working with properties (Adding new properties to the PowerPoint files) 4. Publishing PPT file properties in SharePoint. 5. Searching PPT files in SharePoint. 6. Customizing SharePoint search to find PPT files using the keywords. Like all other Office products, PowerPoint has great publishing feature and you can publish PPT slides directly to SharePoint. As you can see in the figure above, PowerPoint shows two options to save files in SharePoint: 1. Document Management Server 2. Create Document Workspace Create Document Workspace will allow you to create a site in SharePoint and Document Management Server will allow you to select a network share that points to a SharePoint site. You can put the SharePoint site path directly in the File name box if you know it and PowerPoint will save the file in SharePoint. Document Management Pane on the right shows important information related to the file. To show Document Management pane, select Server > Document Management Information. Click the options link at the bottom of the Document Management pane to open the settings screen. You can change some important settings here. For example, to keep your local copy synchronized with the SharePoint copy select Always: update automatically in the last option. This will automatically update your remote copy without asking you first. Interestingly, you can also view version history of the saved files. To view version history, select Server > View Version History. To view versions saved in SharePoint, click the link shown in the window. Ok, another very interesting and useful feature is to save properties along with the file in SharePoint. Yes, I know we could do this in Office 2003 as well (Click here to see how!) but in Office 2007, it is now possible to view or add properties from inside the PowerPoint. Select Prepare > Properties from the Office button. This will start showing the properties window. Add some keywords in the keywords box to test this feature and save the file. Now go to your SharePoint site and open the document library. From Settings, select Document Library Settings. In General Settings, click Advanced settings. Select Yes in the "Content Types" section (Allow management of content types?) and click OK.  Now, there are two ways to show the properties in the document library. Here is method 1: Method 1: On the Settings page, in the Content Types section, click the Document content type. Scroll down and click Add from existing site or site columns. From the columns drop down, select All Groups (See figure below) and select keywords from the list and click the Add > button and then click OK. Method 2: On the Settings page, in the Columns section, click Add from existing site columns. From the "site columns" drop down, select All Groups and from "Available site columns" box, select keywords and click the Add > button to add the column to the view and click the OK button. Make sure Add to default view check box is checked at the bottom. You will notice that the new column "keyword" has been added to the list of columns available in the current view and if you look at the third column "Used in", you will see "Document" has been added as the content type. Now go back to your library and you will see the keywords you entered while working in PowerPoint have been saved in SharePoint. Similarly, you can add other fields from PowerPoint as site columns in SharePoint. If you have enabled Search for your library, you can search documents using the keywords. To enable Search, do the following: 1. Go to the Settings page and click on Advanced settings and select Yes in the Search section (Allow items from this document library to appear in search results?). 2. Click OK to save the changes. Note: The documents will not appear in search results un less SharePoint indexes all new documents. This can be done manually from the SharePoint Central Administration. If the documents have been indexed, you will have no difficulty in finding the documents using the site search box. As you may know, you can also search documents using keywords, which in this case are document properties, using the Advanced search. Click the Advanced Search link that appears next to the search box. Here you can use a property or a combination of properties to search files in SharePoint. Open the Property (Pick Property) drop down, you will notice that the site column "Keywords" that we added to our document library is not visible in this drop down by default. No problem! We can add it ourselves! Yes! this is the beauty of SharePoint. We can customize things easily in this version of the SharePoint. To add "Keywords" column to the "Property" drop down, do the following: 1. Make sure you are on the Advanced Search page. Now, from the Site Actions, select Edit Page. 2. Click the edit link and select Modify Shared Web Part. 3. In the Advanced Search Box, expand Properties by clicking the + sign. 4. Click anywhere in the Properties box, a blue shaded "square" button (ellipsis) will appear. Click this button to view the content of the Properties box in an editor. You will see that the editor contains lot of text and there are quite a few sections in the code. We need to add the "Keywords" property to some of these sections in order to make it appear in the advanced search box properties. 5. Locate the <PropertyDefs> tag in the text and add the following property definition tag inside <PropertyDefs> and </PropertyDefs> tags. <PropertyDef Name="Keywords" DataType="text" DisplayName="Keywords"/> There is another property definition (docKeywords) in this section that has a display name "Keywords" so you may want to change your display name to something else, for example, "Keywords2" or "Tags". I kept the name as "Keywords" and everything worked fine. 6. Locate the tag <ResultTypes>. There is another tag inside this tag: <ResultType DisplayName="All Results" Name="default"> Add the following property reference tag just before the </ResultType> tag: <PropertyRef Name="Keywords" /> There are different types of results, for example, Document results, Excel results, PowerPoint results, etc. Now, because we, at the moment, are only concerned with the PowerPoint documents, therefore, we will make a change in the results of the type "PowerPoint". 7. Locate the following tag: <ResultType DisplayName="Presentations" Name="presentations"> and add following tag just before the </ResultType> tag: <PropertyRef Name="Keywords"/> 8. Click OK to close the editor. 9. Click Apply and then OK to save the web part changes. 10. Click the Publish button to save your changes. 11. Now, go to the Advanced Search Page and search your documents using the keywords. All you have to do now is enter some relevant keywords every time you save your PowerPoint slide, PPT will be saved along with the keywords to the SharePoint library. Save as many files as you like and "SharePoint Search" will do the main job, that is, finding files for you.