SharePoint Workspace

The SharePoint Workspace client application enables offline access to SharePoint data. SharePoint Workspace is the successor to Groove 2007 and ships in the Office 2010 Professional Plus suite as well as stand-alone. Offline access benefits mobile workers (such as salespeople) who need to work on SharePoint data while out of the office, and it can also serve workers in branch offices who want efficient access to SharePoint data that reside on the other side of a WAN link.

Shown here is a SharePoint Workspace view of a simple SharePoint team collaboration site. The left pane shows SharePoint document libraries (such as Shared Documents, shown expanded in the right pane) and other lists from the site that are available offline. For these document libraries and lists, the user can locally add items, delete items, and make changes to items (typically in Office applications), and then synchronize any changes back to the SharePoint site. At the bottom of the pane are three “Available on Server” items that the user can access while online, but not offline, either because SharePoint Workspace cannot synchronize them (such as the Calendar) or because the user has chosen not to download them for offline use.