Office 2007 provides some great new support for disconnected (offline) scenarios for working with content in SharePoint 2007. In order to clarify when/where you’d use each of the applications that will synchronize content with SharePoint, I thought I’d create a post since I've had a number of questions on this.
In addition to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, Communicator, and Publisher, Office Enterprise 2007 includes two new applications – Groove and OneNote. Groove is a great tool for enabling teams to get work done, while Outlook is more of a personal information management tool.
Outlook, Groove, and Access each support varying degrees of offline sync with SharePoint, based on the strengths of that application…read on:
Outlook 2007:
I love Outlook cached mode. Being able to have my personal email, calendar, contacts, and tasks at my disposal whether I’m connected or not is huge for me. In 2007, Outlook takes this a step further by synchronizing certain items from specific SharePoint lists: calendars, tasks, discussions, contacts and document libraries. This data is synchronized into Outlook using native Outlook data types (as in 2003), except now they are synchronized in two directions. For documents (new!), Outlook provides a way to take libraries (or folders) offline into that same local PST. Outlook keeps a read-only copy of the document in the PST. Even though the document is read-only, you can edit Office 2007 documents, since the client application (specifically Word 2007, Excel 2007, or PowerPoint 2007) will prompt you to “edit offline,” which automatically stores the updated document in a local drafts folder. Thus, the Office application becomes responsible for managing any conflicts due to editing on the server. What’s cool is that the applications are pretty smart, since if the document is being editing locally, the user automatically gets the latest edits, whether from the Outlook PST, SharePoint site, or from the local SharePoint drafts folder.
Groove 2007:
Groove 2007 will also be able to synchronize content from a WSSv3 document library. Don't confuse this with Outlook, which is geared toward PIM-style info; Groove takes team information -- document libraries in particular. Groove provides a more extensive set of capabilities in order to fully enable team collaborative scenarios, rather than "one guy working on a document." An example of this is that Groove provides disconnected check-in/check-out so that multiple authors working in a peer-to-peer fashion can still maintain a structured authoring experience. A common scenario will be that a team will work in a dynamic environment inside a Groove workspace and then publish the result up to a SharePoint library. Think of Groove as the best rich-client complement for SharePoint documents – say like Outlook email is to Exchange, or Communicator IM is to LCS.
Ok, so what about the non-PIM and non-document data in SharePoint lists? Read on…
Access 2007
Remember the good old days when you could open Access, create a couple of tables, and track almost any data you can think of? The problem was, of course, where to store the .MDB file so that it could be shared and backed up properly. The good news: Access can now be bound to WSSv3 lists. This provides the rich UI of Access and the server-based benefits of WSS. In addition, Access is able to cache the list data locally, and synchronize changes back to the server, thereby providing a disconnected experience for data-centric tracking applications. Access 2007 doesn't synchronize documents from a SharePoint document library (that's what Groove is for). Its focus is on data-centric applications, including custom applications, so it can synchronize custom metadata columns from any list or library. I’d recommend considering Access for your data tracking applications going forward – you’ll get a rich UI plus the server side benefits of SharePoint like workflow, a reach UI, search, etc.
In short:
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