WWW – Warm Welcome, Workspace 2010

 

Wondering! about this warm welcome to Workspace 2010? Yes, It’s the New Space in the Microsoft’s Office Applications, officially named as “Microsoft® SharePoint Workspace 2010”. Its a successor to the Microsoft Office Groove 2007. Nevertheless, you can have Two-In-One i.e., both New “SharePoint Workspace” as well as old Groove as “Classical Workspace”.

Still wondering! on what you can work-on in this space?  You can work offline on all the  contents of  SharePoint  like; Tasks, Announcements, Links,  Team Discussions,  Shared Documents in a new way.  A click on a magical strip – a Ribbon “Sync to Computer” under does this all. A synchronized copy of the entire or a portion (subset) of the site is available right on to your computer. A word of caution: Sync only the sites from the sources which are well known and which are safe.

 

 

It will open up a “Sync to Computer” and then “Configuration Settings” Dialog. You can select a List or a library to sync to the “SharePoint Workspace”, sorry to the “Groove” (till you are comfortable with the new Name)

 

Afterwards, it is child’s play like drag and drop documents into and out of documents pane, opening any document. Now you can work seriously with the local copy even when you are not connected to the server.  The changes are stored locally which can be synchronized automatically or manually.

Its not a big deal that SharePoint can search anything and everything under the hood. Even the contents which are stored locally can be searched in your computer (local) as usual which are indexed by the search engine.

whenever it is connected to the server, you can check in or check out. One can even check the Server Properties of files. There is  a facility to navigate back and forth from SharePoint Server to Workspace and vice versa.