New year, new focus on my blog! So two of my clients have now asked what to do about syncing and offline in SharePoint 2013.
So here goes. It’s gone, that’s right it’s no more. But, it has been replaced, by SkyDrive Pro.
Before we go too far with this though SHAREPOINT WORKSPACE 2010 WILL WORK WITH SHAREPOINT 2013. What you should bear in mind is that Office 2013 does not include the Workspace application so you’ll need to run Office 2013 and Office 2010 (at least the Workspace application) side-by-side. Also, there’ll be no support beyond this version of SharePoint. I you want to run side-by-side you’ll need this update – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2687364
What’s SkyDrive Pro?
It’s a bit like SkyDrive that you might be familiar with from your Microsoft Live account. Essentially it allows you to sync document libraries from SharePoint into the cloud and with the SkyDrive Pro desktop application (part of Office 2013) you’ll be able to sync to folders on your computer so that you can take them offline to work on. Similarly to Workspace when you come back online your changes sync back up to SharePoint with the same sort of conflict resolution you’d expect from Workspace.
Essentially there are actually two versions of SkyDrive Pro, one for on-premise customers and one for Office 365. The 365 version has a capacity (per user) of 7GB, on-premise is configurable to whatever you have the capacity for.
Lots of talk about documents but what about lists?
OK, well lists aren’t supported. You lose that functionality and I think that’s the main reason a lot of people will be running Office 2013 and SharePoint Workspace 2010 side-by-side. Obviously there’s a plan for lists but as to what and when – there’s no word yet.
Back to the original question
So there’s some background but the actual question, thanks to Peter Ward was:
“What is the best way for us to share a workspace with an external customer?”
The answer. The client is running SharePoint 2010 off-premise and so in this instance I’d advise installing SharePoint Workspace 2010 with the update linked to above. The other option of course is to open SharePoint to clients through an extranet configuration but this might work out easier and closer to current practices.
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Andy Noon - SharePoint since 2001 
Thanks for the blog! As an Office2013 user, i need to connect to a SP2010-based platform. After some work i found out OneDrive will not work with SP2010, so i guess i need to go for what you described, a side-by-side with SharePoint Workspace. You say “at least the Workspace application”: i have searched but not yet found where i can download and install only that application. I tried the link to the update you provide, but when installing that software stated it could not find anything to update. Do you know where i can download “the Workspace application”?