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!

Back in April we started to look at the upcoming capabilities in Groove 2007 for taking SharePoint offline. We posted a second time on the feature walkthrough of beta 2 in early June and then completed the walkthrough later in the month. This is the final post, and summary, in the series on taking SharePoint offline with Groove 2007.

Please bear in mind that I am the founder of Colligo Networks, a company engaged in developing offline collaboration software tools, so I am not a disinterested third party.

The ability to take SharePoint sites and content offline has been called the “Holy Grail” by both analysts and bloggers. This is because the ability to work offline is deemed to be essential for the growing population of mobile workers, yet it was not previously supported natively in SharePoint. In Office 2007, Microsoft has improved on this, most notably through desktop apps such as Outlook, Access and Groove. Some in the press have called Groove 2007 Microsoft’s answer for offline access to SharePoint content. On the other hand, Microsoft has been careful to describe it as a way of taking document libraries, only a portion of SharePoint content, offline. The purpose of this series has been to look at what will be included when Groove 2007 ships towards the end of this year. So, here’s the summary of what we found during testing.

Groove 2007 is a collaboration application designed for peer-to-peer information sharing, particularly for project teams and those that work across enterprise domains. It has a lot of functionality and therefore occupies a pretty big footprint on the desktop – about 700 MB. A small part of it’s functionality is an interface to SharePoint 2007, and for the purposes of this review, we concentrated on that aspect of it.

For Groove users wanting to take SharePoint files offline, the Files Tool is pretty easy to use. While online, the user simply enters the URL of the site they want to sync with and all document libraries are displayed. Once a library, folder or file is selected, Groove synchronizes the content down to the desktop and it is available offline. Files can be opened and edited and new files added to the library. Offline changes can then be sync’d with the Sharepoint server either manually or automatically on a time interval. Conflicting edits, when a change is made to the client copy and server copy of a file at the same time, are flagged during the sync cycle so that the user can choose the version they want to keep.

However, Groove 2007’s SharePoint implementation has several limitations. Its’ sole focus on SharePoint 2007 may be an issue for companies that can’t transition all of their content from SharePoint 2003 right away. In addition, users cannot create new documents, such as blank InfoPath forms, from SharePoint templates when disconnected since they are not stored locally.

Groove stores only a few default metadata columns, so document libraries cannot be sorted in the files tool based on custom metadata. Views are not supported either therefore, together with limited metadata, offline users will find it difficult to view, organize and retrieve documents from large SharePoint libraries like they can online. The fact that files are stored in a proprietary offline database as opposed to the file system means that embedded links in documents will not function offline like they do online.

Finally, by design Groove 2007 offline support is limited to SharePoint document libraries. This means that content in standard lists (i.e. links, events, announcements, issues, contacts, tasks etc.) and custom lists cannot be added, viewed or edited by offline users.

The bottom line: The developers at Groove (now Microsoft) have done a good job of implementing a tool that enables a user to sync files contained in SharePoint sites down to a workspace on their laptop. If a company has or is planning to deploy Groove to support project teams, then this is a must-have capability. However, for companies that are just looking for an offline solution for SharePoint for their mobile workforce, we would recommend looking at other solutions before making a purchase decision. Groove only supports a subset of SharePoint features and, given its size and complexity, may be significant overkill for the task.

Next up: I’ll do a summary of Outlook 2007 based on an updated evaluation of beta 2, and do a full review of Access 2007’s offline SharePoint capabilities. Let me know what you think.

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.

In March of 2005, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring Groove Networks. Groove is an interesting peer-to-peer collaboration tool that has many of the same functions as SharePoint, which is a portal-based solution. So it begs the question “How does Groove fit into Microsoft’s SharePoint strategy?” At the time of the acquisition, Ray Ozzie, Groove’s founder and now Microsoft Chief Technical Officer said:

“Distributed teams can use Groove to create ad-hoc workspaces that reside on team members’ PCs and later have the documents, plans and other workspace content published to a managed SharePoint Web Portal.”

Now that Microsoft is gearing up to deliver Office 2007, how will Groove support SharePoint, and vice versa?

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 1 with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. The capabilities of these products could change significantly 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.

In this first post on the subject, I want to look at what SharePoint is and how Groove’s support for it is being discussed publicly.

According to Microsoft, SharePoint is “…a development platform for creating collaboration and information-sharing applications.” In January, 2006 Kurt Delbene, Corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office server group, commented,

“SharePoint Products and Technologies have become a key part of our strategy for delivering a complete working environment for information workers, where they can collaborate together, share information with others, and find information and people that can help them solve their business problems.”

Dustin Millers blog is an excellent review of the features coming in SharePoint 2007. He outlines a rich platform that includes calendars, surveys, discussions, lists, views, metadata, workflows, multi-level security and, yes, documents. So Windows SharePoint Services is much more than a document repository and its feature set is growing in 2007.

During the initial proof of concept phase for our offline SharePoint products, we interviewed a lot of systems integrators and during our beta engaged with about 250 end user customers. We found out that, in fact, customers are embracing the diverse tools in SharePoint to build unique applications. In particular, they are using custom lists, metadata and views, and plan to use the workflow features in Office 2007 to increase the productivity of their teams. In short, they told us that the “services” of SharePoint were of great value to them. The problem they had was using these services offline when they were traveling and/or occasionally connected to the Internet.

The need for offline SharePoint capability has been reinforced by bloggers such as Chris Chapman who calls it the “SharePoint Holy Grail”. Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst was quoted in Network World in March of this year

“…there is such a significant requirement for an offline store for SharePoint Services. It is mandatory to be able to take that stuff offline.”

However, there seems to be a bit of confusion about the extent of Groove’s offline support of SharePoint. For example, the same article states:

“Office Groove 2007…is being developed as the cache (offline) client for Microsoft’s Windows SharePoint Services and the renamed SharePoint Server in Office 2007.”

This would seem to indicate that Groove will enable users to take advantage of the services (not just the document libraries) in SharePoint when working offline. In contrast, Marc Olsen, Group Program Manager for Groove, who blogged last November about the changes coming in Groove 2007 (then called Groove 12) said

“For Groove 12, we’ve taken a different approach that we think matches more closely how we think people work as well as being more in-line with the long term direction for WSS and Groove…we’re deprecating [phasing-out] the current Mobile Workspace for Sharepoint template that ships in Groove 3.1…The model shifts from ‘site replication’ to ‘list replication’…For Groove 12 we are introducing a new Sharepoint Files Tool that lets you bring a particular document library or a folder from a document library into Groove.”

So which is it? 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?

In subsequent postings on this topic I will look more closely at what is really offered in Groove 2007, including a detailed feature walkthrough of my testing of the offline Sharepoint capabilities of Groove 2007 Beta 1 and some of the advantages and limitations of the approach they have taken. I’d also like to look at compatibility issues such as which versions of SharePoint are supported in Groove 2007 and how the different Groove versions will work together. As always, your comments, questions and criticisms are welcome.

Barry.