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.
I like your Colligo reader but is there a way to use this full offline, ie: on a CD-Rom ?
We will update it once a month, burn the ColligoReader to CD-Rom to send away,
thanks in advance.
Thanks for the question, Francois. Unfortunately with Colligo Reader the local data store (cache) is fixed to a particular location on the users hard drive and cannot be modified. Colligo Contributor (www.colligocontributor.com) includes the capability to modify the location of the data store. The could be set to a location on a CD-ROM if that is what you want to do. It also lets you edit and modify content on a SharePoint site. You can purchase Colligo Contributor at the Colligo Store (www.colligo.com/store).
Barry.
Is there a way to search synchronized documents on Colligo as you could on a SharePoint site?
Yes, since Contributor stores files locally on the file system, Windows Desktop Search can be used to find the content it has stored. There is a knowledge base article on how to set this up here.
Barry.