The Groovier Side of SharePoint Workspace 2010

By Mike Ferrara (@mikecferrara) Jun 9, 2010

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There's more than one way to collaborate and work with SharePoint 2010 (news, site), and Microsoft has SharePoint Workspace 2010 to prove it. Not sure what this Workspace thing is? Let's have a closer look.

If you were like most in 2006, then you had no clue what Office Groove was. You might still not have a clue as to what it is even now. I don’t blame you. The name ‘Groove’ was simply the result of a 2005 Microsoft purchase of Groove Networks, a collaborative product allowing multiple users to work on documents simultaneously.

It was incorporated into the next major release of Office as the on-the-fly Office collaboration and offline synchronization tool for SharePoint. I can’t tell you how many times a user asked me why they couldn’t manage their mp3s with Groove. The average user had no clue what Groove was, because the name couldn’t be farther from what the product actually did.

A Better Name, A Better Product

Although the product's goals have not changed, the name has been changed to more accurately identify it amongst the crowd of Office apps. SharePoint Workspace 2010 should now entice users to actually fire it up and make use of its capabilities.

We can all relate to what a workspace is, because it’s something critical to business productivity. You can’t work without one, but having one doesn’t always equal productivity. So how does SPW (SharePoint Workspace) measure up to its predecessor, Office Groove? First, let’s get our feet wet.

The Basics

For the Groove/SPW newbies, this product is, at its core, a non-web-based collaboration and synchronization tool. You’ll be able to quickly synchronize data for offline usage and collaborate on documents simultaneously with other users. The product aims to satisfy both road warriors and desktop power users alike.

There are three main objects that you can create with SPW, and they are:

SharePoint Workspace — A bi-directional synchronization of SharePoint 2010 content. You — the content owner — have access to this content on your local machine. This is not intended to be a sharing mechanism amongst users, but rather a local copy of SharePoint content for a particular user.
Groove Workspace — Peer-to-peer content collaboration amongst users regardless of boundary. Just as in Groove 2007, you can share content in a Groove Workspace with someone outside of the firm. So rather than syncing to SharePoint, these workspaces are synced to each member.
Shared Folder — This is simply a shared folder accessible to the Windows file system. It is accessible via the user account used during creation. The only change in SPW is that shared folders are now supported in a 64-bit OS.

As you can see below, all three of these objects can be created right from the SPW Launchbar.

(Editor's Note: SharePoint Workspace 2010 isn't the only cool new feature in SharePoint 2010, take a look at: 5 Cool Things in SharePoint 2010 That You May Not Know About.)