SharePoint on an Airplane

No it’s not the title of some B grade movie, but something that I’m doing for real. For some time now, I’ve trialled a number of software packages to take SharePoint sites offline. The aim being to make as much content in a SharePoint site available offline so that I can continue working on it whilst away from the office. I’ve settled on the Colligo Contributor as the one that I’m using due to a number of factors. They have two versions Colligo Reader and Colligo Contributor. The Reader is a free version that is read-only, whilst the contributor allows bi-directional access to the offline sharepoint data.

Now before you go getting all excited, let me say that you can’t actually take all of your data offline. Depending on the actual configuration or your SharePoint Site, some information may be read only as it depends on other facets of the SharePoint site. For this trip to the US, I’ve taken a number of document libraries offline as well as some lists. Furthermore, i’ve made them available from within Outlook 2007.

When your browsing a site you can take it offline from within the WSS site itself below, I’ve taken the http://companyweb3/Tech Writing offline using the Outlook Add-in a pretty simple process really.

Once offline, you can see the various libraries below that I have access to from within Outlook. You can also access them directly from within the Colligo Contributor program, although I prefer the Outlook interface myself.

And then in the centre window pane you can see the contents of the actual document library itself. From here you can do most things that you would normally do. In fact, due to the automatic sync facility within Contributor, you could operate totally from within the Outlook environment even when your online!

So there you have it if you’ve been looking for a solution to take SharePoint data offline, I recommend you take a look at Colligo Contributor as a potential solution.