MSR Consulting TechnoBlog

Take your Sharepoint site with you! Colligo releases offline sharepoint products

May 19th, 2006

For many corporations, Microsoft SharePoint is becoming the centerpiece of collaboration for their business processes, however it can only be used by people when they are online and connected to the server. This means that users cannot leverage the project management capabilities of SharePoint when they are working offline; for example on a plane or at a client site.

For example, we deployed a large Sharepoint Portal Server solution for the Product Development division of a well-known luggage and pack gear manufacturer.  Specifically, this solution was about project management and collaboration with a widely dispersed team of individuals with varying degrees of technology prowess.  A very important part of the systems workflow involved the stages of quality control that took place in prototyping a product…with the designers of the specifications sitting in the U.S. and the factory making the prototypes in China.  That part of the equation was fine, China is well connected to the internet after all (well, ok, the factories do tend to have haphazard connectivity but it worked well enough).  The real challenge was that there were very short time windows in which these sample prototypes could be evaluated remotely, and most importantly be approved/disapproved and commented on.  But getting 5 employees and 3 executives to review the information and provide their feedback for consensus was invariably gumming up the works.

 So why this long story about a seemingly off-topic subject?  Because the main reason we could never get all those peoples feedback in a timely manner was due to the fact that executives and those heavily involved in the manufacturing supply chain tend to spend a great deal of time on the road and in airplanes.  Places that Sharepoint, as great as it, was never able to go.  Like most network based applications, Sharepoint is tethered to connectivity as surely as any website.  And unlike a static website, you can’t productively just “make a copy” for browsing offline using traditional tools for that purpose.

To date my firm has expended untold hours for our client hacking together kludgy solutions to allow some semblence of the required workflow to happen offline.  Hours that both we and our client would have preferred putting to more innovative uses.  As they say, it aint pretty.

So you’ll hopefully now better understand and forgive me, or at least look the other way, as I shout from the mountaintops about the first release of Colligo For Sharepoint.  A product for taking Sharepoint offline.  The Colligo Reader is, as the name suggests, for Reading only.  And the great news, is that its absolutely free.  In addition, their bread and butter product is Colligo Contributor.  A product which includes the complexity of two-way synchronization so that you can make changes to your copy of the Sharepoint site while offline and when reconnected the software will publish your changes while synchronizing the changes that occured to the master site while you were offline.

[From The Colligo Site]

Created to deliver rich functionality in an uncomplicated way, the Colligo SharePoint product family is the easiest solution to deploy, install, learn and use. These products require no server components and are compatible with all shipping versions of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server. They provide a new level of SharePoint feature support in a client-only implementation, including document and InfoPath form libraries with custom metadata and views, custom lists and many standard lists including events, issues, links, contacts, announcements, tasks and agendas.

Colligo Reader provides read-only access to SharePoint content offline. This is an ideal solution for laptop users who are periodically offline since the application is so simple that user training is typically not required.

So, if you use Sharepoint in your daily life you’ll understand just how big a deal this is…and if you don’t, this might just take away that last barrier that’s been keeping you from it. 

Colligo Reader is available completely free of charge and can be downloaded here.