By: Bob Mixon - MSD2D SharePoint Community Manager and Managing Director of ShareSquared, Inc.

The new version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has a great feature that allows you to connect virtually any list or document library to Microsoft Office Outlook.  Once connected, you can view tasks, calendar entries, and documents from Outlook.  Even better, these items are synchronized so that they're available when you're disconnected from the network, which is especially useful if you travel a lot.  If you link to a document library to work on documents while you travel, when you return to the office and connect to the network, Outlook will automatically synchronize the changes.

To link Outlook and a document library, open your browser and navigate to the document library that you want to access offline.  Click the Actions menu and select Connect to Outlook.  At this point, you'll be prompted to verify that you in fact do want to connect the document library with Outlook. Click Yes.  That's all there is to it.  You can now go to the root SharePoint Lists folders in Outlook and see the link you just created.

One thing to remember, if you delete the list or document library from SharePoint, it won't be deleted from Outlook; you'll need to do that manually.  To accomplish this, simply right-click the link in Outlook and choose Delete.