Spotlight on 2010: Workspace -- The Client for SharePoint

By Joshua Haebets

There are so many exciting features in SharePoint 2010; SharePoint Workspace has to be up there as one of the best. It has been a long time coming, but now we have a rich desktop client that can give users the offline experience they have wanted.

SharePoint Workspace is the new version of Groove, which was added to the Office family in 2007 after Microsoft's earlier acquisition of Groove Networks. Groove was a peer-to-peer collaboration tool, and in 2007, it added the ability to sync with SharePoint sites. But this process was not as seamless as many would have liked.

The release of the 2010 family of Office products has seen Microsoft give users a true offline tool for SharePoint. Workspace allows users to synchronize all collaborative information from SharePoint sites to the desktop. Collaborative information is all list data within a SharePoint site, which includes custom lists, document libraries and external lists. All the metadata and version history comes with the documents.

With a couple of clicks within the browser, a user can download the entire contents of a site to the local machine. The user experience is so good, you will see users using Workspace exclusively and rarely going to the site when working with documents and list items. This also extends to MySite, allowing users to keep all their data within SharePoint, which means that My Documents will no longer need to be synchronized for backup. Administrators will now have the ability to prevent a site from being taken offline to avoid confidential information being taken offsite.

The document management experience within Workspace is as good and in some ways better than the browser. Users have the ability to check in and check out documents, and view version history and all document metadata. This works with the UI, keeping the ribbon in context with the list or library the user is working with. Workspace integrates with the Office suite, allowing users to save directly to any synchronized sites from a quick link within the dialogue box in any of the Office applications.

Another great new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the external list capabilities. These are lists that contain information held in external databases. Business Connectivity Services, previously the Business Data Catalogue, allows you to present line-of-business data in a SharePoint list, where users can add, edit, update and delete items. When connected with SharePoint Workspace, users now have the capability to take this data offline to reference, update and have changes uploaded to the LOB system when they are next connected to SharePoint.

SharePoint Workspace is the offline application we have all been waiting for. It is a simple interface with intelligent synchronization that now enables us to work with our SharePoint data no matter the location or network availability.

Joshua Haebets is a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Specialist based in Australia.