SharePoint Workspace

I already said it a few times but this technology is again a big winner for SharePoint as a whole. Microsoft really wants to give everybody to continue their work no matter where, no matter on what kind of device and no matter if they are connected to the Internet or not.

In this vision, SharePoint workspace plays a very big role. It allows you to take all or parts of your SharePoint stored data offline, continue your work and sync it back to the server whenever you have a connection.

The tool uses efficient syncing which just uploads or downloads changes in the documents. So it will not just start syncing everything in a certain environment. it has 64 bit support, Single Sign On (SSO) and with Windows Search, you can search in your offline workspace. Great !!

SharePoint workspace will try to connect every 10 minutes or so. If it finds a connection, it will ask for the 'health score' of the SharePoint server where 0 is good and 10 is bad. This allows the tool to decide wether is should start sinking or wait another 10 minutes and try again because the server is too busy right know. This technology is ideal for people who are constantly on the road and work with all kinds of different devices.

It was basically designed to work with team sites but other types of sites should work as well. At the moment though, you will not be able to sync wiki's and Calendar stuff. As you have maybe seen in one of my previous posts, if you start up the software, you will see this MSN like screen with an overview of all your workspaces. You will also have a search button to use Windows Search to dive into your workspace. Syncing can be initiated from in to tool or from right in to SharePoint.

After syncing, icons will immediately tell you which documents are unread. Opening the document will even tell you who made which change! This again is part of the co-authoring technology now available in Office 2010. You can choose which parts to sync and which don't and they are clearly put into separate groups on the screen. Dragging and dropping documents from the hard drive to your workspace client is also possible allowing you to add new documents very fast.

Conflicts can be resolved and you can compare the different versions. Again this is based on the co-authoring technology allowing you to see who made changes to which part of the document. When connected, presence information is there and if you want you can initiate a chat to ask more about the changes this person made.

Everything that's in SharePoint will also be available in the workspace. The software will sync all the schema's, document templates, content types, views ... so you can work with them offline. Also permissions will be synced. If you have only read access to certain documents, you will not be able to write changes back to the server when syncing.
Keep in mind that SharePoint workspace will only upload content. So you will not be able to edit the other things like content types or other definitions.

This might be pure logic to you but SharePoint online will also be supported by this software. They will upgrade to SharePoint 2010 late next year.

Errors and issues will be indicated by icons. You can resolve them and the software will try to give a solution.
In the Office Upload Center you will have a complete overview of which content is uploaded, which is cached, which is pending, ... .
Co-authoring is possible if you are connected to the SharePoint server.

As indicated before, the offline workspace will be indexed by Windows so it is searchable.
There will also be a SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 for Windows Mobile 6.5.

Lists with over 30.000 items will not get synced.

There will be a Mac version but as I understood it, you will not have the full feature set.