Offline SharePoint

Next week on Wednesday and Thursday, I have the pleasure of attending the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston. The program looks pretty interesting.

Michael Sampson of Foldera invited me to join a couple of panel sessions. One, entitled “Collaborative Workspaces: A Raft of Tools” is being moderated by Lars Plougmann. The others on the panel are Oracle, IBM, Foldera and Vignette. It’s from 2:30pm – 3:30pm on Wednesday.

The other panel, being moderated by David Via of Wolcott Group, is on Thursday at 11:00am – 12:00pm. It’s title is “Techniques for Mobility: The Success Question”. The other panel member is Bassem Hamdy of CMiC.

I’m planning to attend most of the sessions in the Collaborative Workspaces and Mobility tracks. We don’t have a booth or anything, but if you’d like to get together, just email sales@colligo.com and they will forward it to me.

Barry.

This is the second post on my eval of Groove 2007 as an offline solution for SharePoint. The same caveats apply as part 1 of my review of Groove 2007 Beta 2.

Manipulating files offline with the Groove 2007 SharePoint files tool

The Groove files tool has an easy to use interface. Right clicking on a file revealed a number of functions I could perform such as opening the file, checking it into and out of the server, editing it, saving it to the local hard drive, viewing properties etc. Files can be dragged and dropped to and from the desktop to the tool. The “Add Files” button enabled me to select files from the local file system and add them to the library, while “Save Files” is used to select files in the tool and save them to the local file system. When adding files to a library offline there is no way to fill in the metadata associated with a file and there appears to be no way to edit it using the properties dialog.

In addition, I couldn’t find a way to create a new file from the document library template, like I can in SharePoint. I could create new files for applications installed on my local machine (i.e. a blank word doc), but not from the SharePoint template. Document library templates are used to enable creation of new files in a library in a common format. They are particularly important for InfoPath form libraries since templates are essentially blank forms. In Groove 2007, therefore, it appears to be impossible to open a blank Infopath form and fill it out when I am working offline.

Preservation of Document Links

One of the tests I like to perform is to see how embedded links are handled when libraries are taken offline. This enables me to see how the format of the offline database mirrors that of the online SharePoint database.

Say I have two Excel files, A and B, and one cell in A is linked to the value of a cell in B. On a SharePoint site, if I change the value of the cell in B, the value of the linked cell in A is immediately updated. This works because file locations in SharePoint are represented by standard URLs. In practice, this technique is often used in Excel for consolidating budgets from individual departments into one company budget, for example.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me in Groove. When I sync these files down from SharePoint the link is broken. Even if I open the files offline from the Groove workspace and “paste link” the cell reference again and save the files, the link is broken when I re-open the files. This could be dangerous if you are relying on a Groove workspace to manage financial statements contained on a SharePoint site. Presumably this is because the files are stored in a database that isn’t supported by Excel.

Synchronizing Content

When I added a file to the Sharepoint files tool, Groove showed me that there are unsynchronized changes in the client. Synchronization can be done manually by pressing the big “Synchronize Now” button, or automatically on regular time intervals. Once a sync was initiated, Groove gave me the ability to view pending changes before the sync was actually performed. The new file is then added to the online SharePoint site.

I did some testing with sync times for various file sizes and noted that sync bandwidth is independent of the changes made to a file. This leads me to the conclusion that they have not implemented their binary sync technology for SharePoint, presumably because the web services interface doesn’t support it.

I also wanted to test conflict resolution; to see what happens when conflicting edits are made to both the server and client version of a file. Once I made a change on both sides and initiated the sync, a dialog comes up showing the conflict. Pressing the “Resolve” button brings up the screen below. Selecting the “view” link enabled me to open the local version of the file, or go to the online doc library to open the file on the server. Once I decide which version to keep, I can select it from the radio buttons and the sync will complete.

That’s it for the features of the SharePoint files tool – it doesn’t do much more than that. In my last post I will summarize what I’ve learned and compare it to what the pundits have been saying about Groove 2007 as an offline solution for SharePoint.

Barry.

Back in April I posted about the conflicting information on the web discussing the features in Groove 2007 for taking SharePoint offline. My intention was to post shortly afterward about my experiences with testing beta 1 of Groove 2007 to determine what was actually going to be released. In the interim, however, Microsoft released beta 2, so it makes sense to review the later version. As I stated before, the key question I am asking is: “Is Groove an offline client for SharePoint, meaning that it takes SharePoint site structure offline, or is it just for taking Sharepoint files offline and sharing them in a Groove workspace?”

First, the caveats: I’m the co-founder of Colligo, a company focused on supporting the collaboration needs of mobile teams. We’ve just released our Colligo for SharePoint product family, so while I will try to be unbiased, I am not a disinterested third party. I will be looking at the integration of Microsoft Groove 2007 Beta 2 with Microsoft SharePoint 2007. The capabilities of these products could change prior to release by Microsoft and since the documentation is understandably thin at this point, I may not completely understand how all the products function yet.

Groove 2007 Installation and Setup

Groove is a big application. The installer is a little over 200MB. Despite this, installation went quite smoothly. Once installed, it occupied about 700 MB on my hard drive. The reason for the large size is that it is much more than a tool for taking SharePoint offline. It employs a different collaboration paradigm than SharePoint. In Groove, workspaces are created using unique tools and then shared between clients or through Groove servers. In SharePoint, on the other hand, workspaces are created using SharePoint tools and then shared through SharePoint servers.

Getting documents out of SharePoint and in to Groove

After searching around a bit and eventually turning to the documentation, I discovered that Groove 2007 interfaces with SharePoint through a “SharePoint Files Tool” that is invoked in a workspace. When I selected this tool, I was presented with a dialog that says “Click the “Setup” button below to select a document library”. I tried entering the URL of some of my test sites, but quickly realized that Groove 2007 can only interface with SharePoint 2007, it is not backward compatible to SharePoint 2003.

Once I entered the URL of my 2007 test site, I was presented with a list of document libraries and subsites contained within it. None of the lists present on the site are available here – no standard lists such as contacts, events, announcements, tasks or issues and none of the custom lists. In fact, Groove 2007 does not support anything except SharePoint doc libraries – one library, folder or file per tool. To get multiple libraries from a site, I had to instantiate several files tools in the workspace. While they are an important component, doc libraries represent only a small portion of list types available in SharePoint.

For this evaluation I decided to focus on an InfoPath library, called “IEM Form Library”, contained on a SharePoint 2007 site. Since this is an Infopath form library, the column headings correspond to the fields in the InfoPath form template used to create the library on the server. The column values are metadata values that are used to organize the form library and view the completed forms as a list. On my SharePoint 2007 site, this library looks like this:

Once I selected this library to sync with, Groove quickly sync’d the files within it to my local hard drive and then populated the files tool. The downloaded forms library is presented in Groove as follows:

I noticed a difference between Groove and the original site – metadata used to organize the library is not shown in the Groove version. The original columns aren’t there, and they have been replaced by standard default columns. For large document libraries, this can make it difficult to organize and view the information like I can on a SharePoint site. In testing, I discovered that these same columns are shown for all doc libraries. Apparently Groove does not support custom metadata for any of its supported library types.

That’s it for this post. In my next I will look at how files are manipulated and synchronized in the SharePoint files tool in Groove 2007.

Barry.