To address that concern, the SharePoint Workspace client acts as a middleman to help users work with documents on their systems, as well as drag and drop new documents to the library. And because it synchronizes content for offline viewing, the SharePoint Workspace client even lets users search for documents from within their PC. It is a welcome bridge between your users (especially those who have to work offline at times) and your SharePoint content. Because your use of SharePoint is only going to grow over time, especially with the decommissioning of Public Folders in future Exchange versions, this middleman role is essential to user acceptance.
The library support also allows Office documents to gain new capabilities, the SharePoint Workspace team claims, including co-authoring, automatic merging, and differential sync. Just recently I had a chance to see a live demo of SharePoint 2010, and it amazed me how easy it was to pool data from business applications into SharePoint. But what impressed me even more was how you can now pull that data into the SharePoint Workspace application as well. Thus, you have information in a SQL database that can be pulled quickly and easily into a SharePoint site (and it becomes linked so that you can edit that data from the site), then synchronized with a SharePoint Workspace as an offline resource while on the go (but one that you can edit and resync later on). Truly impressive.
In support of the new release, Microsoft started a new SharePoint Workspace blog, where you can keep up with all the changes and new features and get tips and tricks on using SharePoint Workspace to the fullest. Of course, my blog will continue to share the key findings from both Microsoft's resources and from my own work with SharePoint.
Follow J. Peter Bruzzese on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JPBruzzese.
This story, "SharePoint Workspace: The renamed Groove has gotten groovier," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in SharePoint and Windows at InfoWorld.com.
