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SharePoint Workspace

Written by: Margriet Bruggeman, Nikander Bruggeman.

May 2, 2010

SharePoint Workspace

The ultimate ECM solution should allow information workers to work so flexible that they can do so anywhere they want, and anyhow they want to work. The ability to work offline is an essential part if you are really serious about executing such a vision. To this end, a couple of years ago Microsoft decided to acquire a product called Groove. In SharePoint 2010, it's called SharePoint Workspace and it fits in with SharePoint Server 2010 in a very natural way. Because of the importance of offline working, we will devote a blog post to this topic that shows you the basics of working with SharePoint 2010 Workspace.

  1. Click Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010. This opens SharePoint Workspace.
  2. Then, open Internet Explorer and browse to a SharePoint site. We have chosen to open a site called TestSite. It contains a couple of documents of different types.
  3. Click Site Actions > Sync to SharePoint Workspace. This is shown in Figure .
  4. Sync'ing to a SharePoint Workspace causes the Sync to Computer dialog window to open. Click the Configure button shown in Figure.
  5. This opens the Configure Settings window. You can use it to configure which lists and libraries you want to synchronize.
  6. For example, if you click the Shared Documents library, the possibility appears to download All Content, Headers Only, or No Content.
  7. Once you have made your choices, the synchronization continues.
  8. If you switch back to SharePoint 2010 Workspace, you will notice that the the site you have just synchronized is displayed.
  9. If you click on the TestSite node, you will see the offline equivalent of your SharePoint site.
  10. You can do the same thing the other way round by dragging and dropping a file to the Shared Documents folder in SharePoint workspace. In this case, we will add a document called MyText.txt.

After some time, you will notice that the document MyText.txt is added to the Shared Documents library in SharePoint as well.


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