Offline SharePoint

I noticed this excellent post by Scott Jamison, an Information Worker architect at Microsoft. He clearly discusses the approach used in Office 2007 for taking SharePoint content offline, which he describes as follows:

Outlook, Groove, and Access each support varying degrees of offline sync with SharePoint, based on the strengths of that application

Note: bolding mine.

I think this emphasizes how Microsoft’s approach differs from that of third parties. Rather than providing a single tool that emulates the functions of SharePoint offline, MS has chosen to pepper parts of it throughout Office 2007. I suspect this was preferrable since each application has its own strengths and an established offline user interface model that differs from SharePoint. Scott outlines when he thinks each application should be used for taking SharePoint content offline:

Outlook: Aggregate PIM and document information from SharePoint sites for personal use
Groove: Team collaboration and the richest offline team document experience
Access: Data-centric and other “tracking” applications

For a complete summary of the parts of SharePoint that are supported by each of these applications, you may want to look at our previous post on that topic.

As Scott points out, since Outlook documents are read-only, you will need to add another “client application (specifically Word 2007, Excel 2007, or PowerPoint 2007)” to post modified documents back to the SharePoint site. This is great if it’s an Office document, but if you are storing content from a non-Office application (say Visio or a third party product) in SharePoint, you have to upload modified content back to the server manually through a browser.

None of the Office 2007 applications store SharePoint document templates along with the library so, for example, it is not possible to fill out a blank Infopath form offline simply by clicking “New” at the top of the library as one does on a SharePoint site. You would need to separately download it to your hard drive, edit it and, in the case of Outlook, manually store it back on the SharePoint site through a browser when online. If you plan to use Outlook or Groove to store documents offline, be aware that they don’t store custom metadata, or allow you to organize libraries using views. Finally, since the offline data is stored in different database formats depending on the application, links between content are not preserved offline and content cannot be found on your hard drive using standard desktop search tools.

In the end, you will have to decide how you want to manage your content when working with SharePoint offline. If you plan to use SharePoint in the same way all the time for limited content or don’t mind having to use several applications to synchronize with the server, Office 2007 may be the right choice. However if you are looking for a single application that stores and synchronizes SharePoint document libraries and templates, standard and custom lists, metadata and views for Office and non-Office applications, you should consider a third party solution such as Colligo Contributor.

One of the most interesting findings from our survey was the speed with which organizations intend to deploy SharePoint 2007. We asked two questions on the topic: When are they planning to deploy WSS 2007 and when are they planning to deploy MOSS 2007. We expected to see deployments late in 2007, but to our surprise, respondents indicated deployment sooner.

53% of respondents indicated that they would deploy WSS in early 2007, while 17% indicated late 2007. However, 26% of respondents were not sure when they would deploy. So, of those that ARE sure, 72% were deploying WSS in early 2007 and 23% in late 2007 – a total of 95% in 2007.

The overall percentage of users indicating a definite move to MOSS 2007 is lower with only 66% indicating firm plans. This could be because smaller organizations may not deploy MOSS at all. The upgrade is, understandably, a little bit slower as well due to the complexity of server deployment. Of those that ARE sure, 55% said they would deploy in early 2007 while 39% indicated late 2007.

In my next post on survey results, I will report on when the respondents plan to deploy Outlook 2007.

We’ve been playing around with the Office 2007 Beta 2 technical refresh today and haven’t found anything too surprising yet. We’ve installed the new server and the client apps and, so far in testing, Outlook, Access and Groove seem to provide the same level of capabilities as Beta 2 for taking SharePoint offline, although there seem to be some improvements and changes. Once we’ve completed the testing I’ll put together evaluations and post them here as I did for the previous beta versions of Groove and Outlook.

In preparation, I did some searching on the web to see what others had been saying. I noticed an August 31st post by Eric Cherng where he described the need for offline access to SharePoint content:

So many times in the past I had to meet with a client in their office so the day before I would download all my documents stored in SharePoint one by one.

He went on to describe why it’s hard for many “road warriors” to deal with the server connectivity issues when they travel to customers and partners:

Extranet access is one possible way to avoid the need to download local copies, but you still have the problem of needing an internet connection. Being at the client site, sometimes IT security makes it a big pain to get internet access (ie. have to get permission, need to authorize the machine, dynamic or static ip, WEP/WPA key, …). There are so many other things you have to worry about, why deal with another issue?

Eric then provides a good overview of the features in Outlook 2007 for taking some of the SharePoint content-types offline. Upon first reading I thought he reported that Outlook 2007 can detect changes to offline document libraries and automatically upload them to the server. So I tested that capability right away. Nope, it was just my misreading of his post. He was referring to detection of changes to document libraries on the SharePoint server (which he says was a bit unreliable in the beta 2 version). In fact, Outlook 2007 still only supports one way sync of docs to the desktop. You must upload changed documents one-by-one using another Office application (such as Word or Excel). If it’s not an Office document, you are out of luck. Changes must be uploaded manually when back online.

I also noticed that he mentioned support for “wiki pages” – a library of .aspx pages that can link to wiki pages and other objects online. However it’s difficult to see how this offline implementation is useful for most users, since they would have to view and edit aspx code using an application like SharePoint designer (the old FrontPage). This is certainly not recommended for the average user. Support for offline wiki SITES would be useful, but Outlook 2007 doesn’t support that yet.

Eric went on to say that Outlook 2007 supports a subset of SharePoint content and that users can use MS Access to get some of the other types. I don’t want to give you the impression that he was negative about the Office 2007 capabilities (far from it), but as I mentioned in the last post, I believe the need to use several applications may be confusing to many users.

Great post, Eric!

By the way, if all you need is one way sync of SharePoint content to your laptop, you might want to check out Colligo Reader, which provides a more complete “read-only” SharePoint offline experience. Best of all, it’s free!

I just found a very interesting post about the History of SharePoint on Sharon Richardson’s “Joining Dots” site. Her bio says she’s been in IT for 16 years and spent six of them at Microsoft. Clearly, she gained a lot of experience and knowledge as the UK lead for SharePoint at Microsoft. I had a chance to poke around her blog and I think she has some very interesting insights, such as this post entitled “Chasm Microsoft”. I’ve been a big fan of Geoffrey Moore since he came to Vancouver in 1994 to present a two day seminar on his new book, Crossing the Chasm. I’ve also had the pleasure of seeing him speak a couple of times at the annual ACETECH forum in Whistler.

It was cool to see the impact that a local Vancouver company, NCompass Labs, had on the development of CMS and, in turn, SharePoint. I spent the other night chatting with NCompass founder and CEO, Gerri Sinclair, at the annual Ventures West party. What a delightful, energetic and scary smart person she is!

It is also interesting to see that Business Intelligence is becoming more of a focus for SharePoint. One of our Directors, Greg Wolfe is, I’m sure, watching this closely as he is Senior VP and General Manager of Americas operations for Business Objects. Greg joined the senior management team at BOBJ when they acquired another local successful software company, Crystal Decisions. It’s so humbling (and exciting) to see the great software companies that have emerged here.

Back to Sharon’s SharePoint history… I noticed her comment:

Another missing piece of the SharePoint puzzle has been offline synchronisation. The local web store was originally going to be used, but that project was cancelled before it was ever launched. Outlook was the logical place to introduce such a feature and, sure enough, you will be able to have offline SharePoint folders in Outlook when the next version is released. But in 2005, Microsoft acquired Groove, a peer-to-peer (P2P) team-based collaboration product that also includes synchronisation of SharePoint sites. This will likely cause some confusion again with customers, similar to when STS and SPS first appeared. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Groove has its own built-in forms service, and InfoPath also provides a forms service.

As we posted previously, limited offline support for SharePoint features is peppered through several Office 2007 applications, however none of them will support all its’ rich features. This means the offline SharePoint experience will vastly differ from the online which also add to the confusion, particularly as end users start to pick up on the advanced features of version 3 of SharePoint. We’re betting customers will choose a third party offline SharePoint solution to fill in this obvious gap.

One of the open ended questions we asked in our survey was how respondents were using our offline SharePoint tools today. Below is a summary of some of the most common answers:

Who uses offline SharePoint tools?

Department and division managers: traveling to remote locations.

Sales people: when on the road or at a customer location.

All staff: to provide access to SharePoint when they are offline.

IT project managers: to take offline copies of IT project related sites for use when on client premises.

Engineering project managers: to be able to view content when working off site.

Consultants: to enable them to work in the field.

Analysts: to access the latest commodity information when they travel.

Frequent travelers to, and staff in, foreign countries.

Why do they need them?

Customers or partners often do not allow visitors to connect through their firewall to access SharePoint content.

Obtaining a reliable connection to SharePoint can be difficult when users are in transit, such as on a plane or train.

In foreign countries, particularly in the developing world, Internet connections are often unreliable or unavailable.

How do they Use them?

To sync to the latest versions of sales tools, such as presentations, specifications, and media content for availability while traveling or at a customer site.

To have the latest copies of reference documents, such as practice manuals when out of the office.

To edit documents or list items without connecting to the internet.

As a personal backup of SharePoint site content.

For team members working offsite to have access to the teams documents wherever they are.

Next, I’ll discuss our respondents’ plans for deployment of SharePoint 2007.

We asked our survey respondents to tell us how many employees worked in their organization. 38% had over 1000 employees, 31% between 100 and 1000 and 31% below 100. So the majority of Colligo for SharePoint users who responded to the survey are from larger organizations.

We also asked how many SharePoint users their organization had. 62% of our survey respondents at organizations with over 1000 employees reported over 1000 SharePoint users. This indicates that SharePoint has become a mainstream collaboration platform used by many employees, not just isolated pockets – at least among our customer base.

Next, we’ll look at how our survey respondents are using offline SharePoint products.

Response has been strong since we launched Colligo Reader and Colligo Contributor in the spring of this year. Now that there is a critical mass of users of the Colligo for SharePoint products, we felt that it was time to survey our customers. We learned a lot about the nature of SharePoint deployments at their organizations, their plans for future upgrades, how they are using our products, how they like them and what features they will be looking for in the future.

Some of the results we received were surprising to us. We thought they might be interesting to others, so over the next while I’ll post some of them here.

In this post I’ll talk about how the survey was conducted. In early August, we sent out email requests to a selection of our end users. About 130 people from over 100 different companies responded. We use a tool called QuestionPro to do our surveys and by all accounts it performed pretty well. The survey consisted of 13 multi-part questions.

Many of the respondents were from the IT departments of their companies which makes sense since they are generally the primary interface point for software vendors. About 50% of respondents classified themselves as either being in IS or tech support. The other 50% were end users, with the largest being consultants (22%), followed by operations (8%), sales & marketing (7%), finance & HR (2%) and other (11%). So the offline need for SharePoint is spread across several departments.

Next up, I’ll post some interesting things we learned about SharePoint adoption within our customers organizations.