Offline Collaboration in Office 365

I had a question come up around offline collaboration when using Office 365 tools. Mostly the conversation revolved around how someone disconnected (usually on an airplane) can still be productive and not disrupt a collaboration workflow or perhaps running online conversation. Here is a brief article on how this can be accomplished. Purchasing in-flight internet is another option, but if you aren’t doing that then…..

Most of the Office 365 tools will obviously not work in an offline scenario. This includes SharePoint, Teams, PowerApps and all of the native phone applications. They all require connectivity to function.

However, there are 2 tools that can continue to function in a disconnected, offline asynchronous scenario. These tools are Microsoft Flow and the One Drive sync client. These tools make it easy to perform work offline as possible and to resume the full collaboration workflow when reconnected.

Here is a series of steps you can take to maintain a content collaboration scenario while offline.

The modern UI makes it very easy to move and copy content from SharePoint to OneDrive and back again.

Step 1 – Copy or move the content you want to work on while offline to your OneDrive from its location in SharePoint. When you select a file in a library, the information pane on the right side will present 2 options for destinations at the top of the pane. The current library and your OneDrive. (This assumes you have your OneDrive hooked up. All of this requires you to have a OneDrive.)

Step 1B - A best practice is to “Follow” the site you are taking the content from. That is done by clicking the “Follow” link in the upper right corner. That will make it easier to move the content back later.

Step 2- Make sure you are sync-ing your OneDrive to your local machine. That is accomplished by clicking the Sync button on your OneDrive.

Once you have done this the first time, your OneDrive will appear as a structure on your local windows explorer where you can locally save files. You can use this location to save files to your local machine at any time. This location will automatically sync with your OneDrive when connected. It is still fully useable as a local folder when it is not connected to the internet.

This lets you work in a disconnected state, save locally, and have the content automatically upload to your OneDrive when you re-establish connection.

Step 3- Once you are reconnected, you can use the MoveTo feature in OneDrive to place the content back into the SharePoint location where you initially took it from. This will enable any and all workflows related to that content to execute as well.

If you “followed” the site in Step 1B it will be in the “Following” list in the information pane.

If you did not follow it, it should still be in the “recent” list of sites in the information pane. Recent sites are listed under your OneDrive and “Followed” sites.

Note that you can also sync any SharePoint library directly to your local machine just as you can your OneDrive. However, in practice, you do not want to sync too many SharePoint locations and using your OneDrive as a hub for content creation which you then “publish” or “move” to the intranet is a cleaner solution at scale.