Next Office Groove will be SharePoint Workspace 2010!

Even when we all tend to work and live in a 24x7 connected world, there are still cases in which off-line content is still needed. In Sharepoint 2007, off-line functionality is supposed to be provided by...Outlook 2007! Akward, to say the least. You can sincronize lists and read documents locally, but it is not enough to provide an off-line experience at least similar to the on-line one.

Since clearly the strategy of using Outlook as the off-line client for Sharepoint content does not scale up, Microsoft is reshaping Office Groove to become the off-line tool for Sharepoint users. Yesterday the team announced that the next Groove version will be called SharePoint Workspace 2010!

With good off-line support, a broad range of opportunities will open for the on-the-road information worker. Imagine mobile information workers sincronizing their netbooks at home before leaving, working all day long with the data without caring about conectivity and then sincronizing at the end of the day.

Having a tool that always keeps an updated local copy of content, will certainly help people to rely more on the server copies and avoid making manual local copies that lead to versioning issues.