I remember the SharePoint Conference three years ago where SharePoint 2007 was announced.  I was in the Proposion Software booth (we had not been acquired by Quest yet) and had a chance to talk to a lot of Notes customers who were adopting (or at least looking at) SharePoint.  There was a great deal of excitement there as most people were seeing SharePoint 2007 for the first time and they were very happy with what they saw.

At the time, the two biggest reasons that people felt they could not move their Notes applications to SharePoint were (1) the lack of document level security and (2) the inability to implement even simple workflow logic.  That week, the consensus was that Microsoft nailed both of these in a big way with SharePoint 2007.  Sure enough, the next few years saw a new wave of Notes-to-SharePoint migrations and Proposion (and later Quest) was a big part of that.

In my opinion, the next wave is about to hit.  With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has again addressed most of the remaining concerns that I hear customers talking about when they consider moving their legacy Notes applications to SharePoint.  This series of articles will cover what I think are the most significant factors.

Offline Capabilities

Let’s begin with the most obvious one.  As much as we have all started to count on nearly ubiquitous internet connectivity and bandwidth, many legacy Notes applications depend on the ability to “go offline”.  Notes has always been famous for its ability to replicate whatever data you needed to your laptop and (assuming your application was designed to work that way) allow you to continue working while unplugged. 

SharePoint appeared a decade later and was designed for a modern connected world and was optimized for server applications that delivered much lower cost of ownership and many other benefits.  But there are still cases where you simply have to be able to work on the airplane, at the customer site where you can’t access the internet, or in your vacation home “off the grid”.

SharePoint Workspaces address this need.  You can synchronize lists, libraries and entire sites to your laptop, use them offline, and then sync up with the site the next time you are connected.  This includes not only the data, but much of the logic of the site (including custom data entry forms), resource data (such as lookup lists that your application depends on), and so on.  When users click the “Sync to My Computer” button they have the choice of downloading everything (the default), just the application but not the content, or a customized selection of available content. 

There are a lot of smarts about how application functionality should work in this scenario.  For example, certain workflow operations will execute only when new documents are posted back to the server.  Another example is the way the offline application will try to connect to an online resource that the user decided not to replicate locally (so offline does not have to be all or nothing).

Not surprisingly, much of this is based on Groove technology, which was built by many of the same developers that worked on the original Notes product.  Personally, I did not see the first few releases of Groove to be very useful for general offline capabilities as it required too much special setup, development and user training.  But I believe that Microsoft has done a great job at taking the best of the Groove plumbing and repackaging it as a very compelling offering that fulfills most of the “offline” needs of a typical Notes application.

My absolute favorite part of all this is the way SharePoint Workspaces works with the new application development capabilities that have been added to SharePoint, SharePoint Designer, InfoPath and other Office applications.  More on that topic in future posts.