How do you best manage offline documents

[Erik Wettergren]

Hi,

We're looking at setting up a new SharePoint 2016 Server solution for our company.

We wish to completely get rid of folders and instead manage our documents with meta data - the way it should be!

However, we do have the need to ensure access to files even when users are offline. The "sync" button should take care of this I reckon but how do you organize offline content in order to find your files? Filtering and sorting metadata seem to work well online - but I can't see any of those library features are included in the synced folder on your local hard drive.

A typical document library would consist of thousands of files and probably several gigabytes of data.

Ideally you could create views and sync each view to a folder on your hard drive - but I cannot find any such a solution.

What is best practice for managing offline files? 

[#2]

You can't sync right now with meta data so offline isn't really an option for your use case. Also offline files from a single document library is asking for trouble. Setting a standard library definition that runs across multiple Teams/Group/Sites etc. and making use of search is probably a better options, then your sync's are limited to those Teams, but your asking for trouble going with an offline for files these days in that scenario.

[#3]

OK, thanks for helping out here!

Too bad syncing is not going to work - guess we should disable it all together since otherwise people will still use it only to find a huge pile of unstructured files, add folders locally and then those folders will be synced back up into SharePoint ruining the whole setup in just a few days.

You say that offline files from a single document library is asking for trouble - can you clarify that? why is it asking for trouble (apart from the lack of offline meta data support)?

Setting a standard library definition across multiple teams/Groups/sites sounds interesting but I haven't seen this approach described anywhere before - do you have a reference to "how to do it"?

Also I fail to see this solve anything really as sync of one teams documents still would give hundreds of unsorted offline files.

I have a really hard time to get my head around the fact that Microsoft havent solved this better since they have promoted meta data document management for well over 10 yrs, why no proper offline support in Windows10?