The SharePoint Workspace and other changes increase
SharePoint's speed.
The Microsoft SharePoint conference in October was a fun week filled with excitement and high quality presentations about SharePoint 2010. At the time of the conference, SharePoint 2010 was in beta, but every presenter used it in live demonstrations, and it was available in a lab for all attendees. It worked well, and the heavy use by Microsoft and the use of the beta by additional companies makes me feel secure that when Microsoft releases the product, the vast functionality will work flawlessly for the average user. If you were to make a list of the top 10 common limitations people have with SharePoint 2007, SP2010 has addressed them all, and added some new surprises.
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In this article, I’ll focus on one thing that should be a favorite for everyone. Response time improvements in SP2010 will create an overall fast user experience when interacting with SharePoint sites. This happens for two reasons: First, the interface has more script that runs from the browser without doing full page refreshes. This means entering an item or updating its column data can happen within a fraction of a second of your mouse click. Of course, web pages still load and data comes from the server, but more data comes faster, and there are much fewer waits for pages relatively speaking.
The second and more exciting way to increase speed is the client-side SharePoint Workspace. This runs on your local PC and allows you to edit and read information from SharePoint. To understand the tool, it helps to think of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook uses the computing power of your local machine to respond to your keyboard commands and mouse clicks instantaneously. It is easy and it works offline. For most people, the web-based nature of SharePoint is a big barrier to SharePoint adoption. It is so much easier to type up an email to share information than to navigate to a SharePoint site and wait for the correct page to appear.
The SharePoint Workspace synchronizes your SharePoint sites to your local PC. It provides a logical breakdown in an intuitive 3 column view that shows your sites, then lists and document libraries, then content of the selected list item or document. Indicators appear next to lists, libraries, and folders that contain new items.
Not only does this allow people to add and edit SharePoint data with no response time lags, it solves the off-line worker problem. Now when I am travelling –whether to a place without a Starbuck’s wi-fi hotspot or on an airplane, I can still access the volumes of data that my projects and workgroups have generated and stored in a SharePoint site. It saves a huge amount of work. Once a person finds the SharePoint Workspace necessary or valuable for reading offline, it will be natural for that person to add information there or edit items. Email will feel inadequate, as it will be obvious that email separates small chunks of information from the main information center. It can be very motivating to put information in SharePoint once you start to realize that is where your ideas and hard work will get the most recognition.