Offline SharePoint

During a Dell mobility conference in Europe last month, IDC put out some statistics about the mobile workforce in Europe:

“Mobility is an inevitable trend,” says Brown. “Currently, nearly 40% of the European workforce is mobile and this number will only increase. Although employers still seem a bit uncomfortable with this growth, the fact is their companies are expanding and becoming more global, therefore, the demands they have on employees are increasing. Working lives and private lives are changing and the boundaries are blurring.”

That’s a real, live trend folks, if I’ve ever seen one. Of course this is great news for the hardware manufacturers (the Dells, Toshibas, and RIMs of the world) that make the gadgets that power the mobile warriors. But digging a bit deeper, there’s clearly something brewing here for software providers that are supporting the mobile workforce.

I bet that the number of European workers who were truely mobile 10 years ago was probably <10%… yeah, that’s a trend right there.

Some things really make ‘going offline’ fun and practical. Software aside, there is some pretty neat hardware out there that is solving some offline mobility problems (how can I travel and listen to music? how can I still do email when I’m not connected? how do I store more on my mobile device?).

1) THE IPOD
I go everywhere with my iPod and my tunes come a long with me. But I don’t think the iPod would be as wonderful as it is if it connected wirelessly to iTunes to download tracks.

Some Podcasts that I listen to [quick plug for the SharePoint Show podcast] are upwards of 40mb+. I can’t imagine downloading something like that over a mobile network or even a choppy wifi connection in the city.

iPod just ‘gets it’ and has perfected an offline player that syncs up when the user has access to a solid network connection.

2) THE BLACKBERRY

RIM and their Blackberry product really understand the offline problem. Email is important, mobility is important, but a network connection isn’t always available. So the RIM team built a solution.

And the Blackberry’s popularity validates the offline mobility niche in a way. There are people addicted to the crack… erm, Blackberry because it keeps them plugged in even if they’re not connected.

3) THE 8GB SAMSUNG i310

Cell phones continue to improve in storage, multimedia, and processing capabilities. Take the recently announced Samsung i310 smartphone which has an 8gb hard drive, windows mobile 5.0, 2MP camera, tv-output, USB 2.0, and stereo speakers!

This almost sounds like Samsung is trying to take the cellular phone offline (is that even possible?!). What would someone do with 8gb of storage? If you could stream everything you ever wanted — music, video clips, emails, apps — then why would you need 8GB of storage? But I feel that Samsung is doing this because they’ve figured out that people actually can’t reasonably stream 8GB of media.

Demand for media consumption on the road keeps increasing, but wireless bandwidth isn’t delivering. For example, I took some pictures with my cell phone (Samsung A920) of my friends at a restaurant last Friday. There were a few good shots in there and I promised to send out a few pictures.

The only problem was that when I uploaded the pictures to my Bell Mobility account, it took 60 seconds just to upload one picture from a 1MP camera phone! Argh. It would’ve been faster if I just gave my buddies the memory card and let them copy the pictures to their hard drive, all offline!

There’s a common theme between all these sexy toys — they make it fun to go offline. No waiting for stuff to download, no worries about shoddy connections. Media is right in your hand, ready to work on or entertain.

CNN Money snagged Bill Gates for a feature called “How I Work.”

It’s a fantastic read to see how one of the world’s busiest executives manages his time. Gates also uses SharePoint to stay productive:

Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

I deal with this by using SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects.
…
SharePoint puts me in touch with lots of people deep in the organization

I imagine that someone like him does a ton of travel and does a lot of work flying. I wonder how he uses SharePoint on the plane and if he runs into any of the common problems when you’re not connected: How can I keep working with SharePoint when I’m not online?

Best quote from the feature: “Paper is no longer a big part of my day.“

The current issue of PC Mag is running a big story titled The Well Connected Traveler. They cover all the gadgetry that you’ll ever need to take with you on the road.

But it’s not all about the hardware. More business people rely on being connected to be productive with their work. Emails need to be checked, WSS team sites need to be accessed, and general research needs to be done.

It feels like PC Mag painted an overly rosy picture of what business travel is really like (and maybe that’s what sells magazines for them). They compile a list of:

• The Best Connected Airlines
• The Best Connected Airports
• The Best Connected Hotels

If you read over the charts, you find that none of the major US airlines have wifi onboard, only a handfull of airports give you free wifi, and most hotels are still getting away with charging for internet access.

Tech columnist John Dvorak goes on later in the piece to say:

Hotel connectivity outside the U.S. is generally subpar. It is often unreliable even in hotels that cater to business travelers. I can’t tell you how often I’ve checked into a brand-name hotel to be told that the network connections were down and would remain down for the next few days.

I’m not sure about how well connected the traveler really is.

Nice diagram to get a conceptual look of SharePoint within the business environment.

But I wonder how the diagram would look like to a client that isn’t connected to the Internet?

Via Roberdan

SDA Asia Magazine has a lengthy intro article for SharePoint developers. They go over the basics like Infrastructure and Architecture, Web Parts, and The Collaboration Engine.

Pretty basic stuff for experienced developers, but it’s a great guide for anyone looking to answer the “Where do I start with SharePoint?” question.

Nick’s got a new little RSS webpart for SharePoint.

Using the Newsgator API, he’s built a blog reader that grabs your RSS feeds in Newsgator and gives them to you in your team site. Quite desirable as RSS feeds keep growing and RSS adoption is following accordingly.

Unfortunately I can’t test it because I’m a Bloglines user. (Hey Nick, any chance you’ll be building SharePointLines with the Bloglines API?)

Anyways, I’ll hold off on any feature requests until he gets v1.0 up and running

If you’re a Newgator user, go give SharePointGator a spin!

Dustin Miller has a killer roundup of the features in the upcoming WSS 3.0.

Some highlights from the list:

• Offline capabilities using Outlook and Groove
• Use of SharePoint sites for email archiving
• Users can participate in workflow from wherever they are editing – via SharePoint, Outlook, or the document itself. Workflows can be initiated from SharePoint or the document.

Christian Nordbakk blogged about a new Channel 9 video that shows off the new Excel 2007.

I’m a sucker for slick interfaces and boy did the upcoming Microsoft Excel look fantastic!

If you scroll to ~36:00 minutes into the video, you’ll see some of the robust SharePoint synching that is built right into Excel.

Daniel McPherson shares his predictions on what he thinks Office Live is going to do:

1) It is going to increase the number of “SharePoint” users dramatically
2) The ecosystem supporting and developing for SharePoint is going to grow dramatically
3) Demonstrates the incredible scalability of the SharePoint platform
4) Will improve the product. Experiences gained from running SharePoint as such a service will be fed back into the core product.

Spot on Daniel. I’d also extend that a bit further by saying that along with the increase in SharePoint users, there is going to be a greater segment of users (mobile salespeople, for example) who’ll have difficulty staying connected to the SharePoint/Office Live server.

Nick Swan goes even further and says:

Office Live is certainly a nail in the coffin of the webhost companies that have been pimping small hosted SharePoint solutions.

Perhaps, but I am under the impression that Office Live is being targeted and marketed to the micro-business segment (1-5 employee companies). Robert Scoble has more on that.

Office Live is still in beta and there seems to be some confusion on what it really *is*. I’m still trying to figure that out myself.