During these months, swimmers are clustering around lakes and pools to escape the heat. Most know to allow only one person on the springboard at a time to avoid colliding with another diver in the water. VMC Solutions Architect Keith Prunella explained that SharePoint 2010 helps offsite employees stay productive – though additional development may be needed to prevent team members from overwriting each other’s work.

In today’s business landscape, employers have to be flexible and accommodate employees who work offsite. SharePoint facilitates this. A team member can work while on a flight without wifi since Microsoft Office is integrated with SharePoint so thoroughly. The employee grabs Word documents, Visio diagrams, and Excel spreadsheets from SharePoint and edits offline while she’s flying. After she’s done, she can save the changes, publishes them to SharePoint once a network connection is established, and the rest of her team accesses the updated files.

However, issues arise when two people grab and change the same file offline and each make different changes to the duplicated file. Every list item in SharePoint has a specific ID so those two files have the same ID. The first file published will occupy its slot in SharePoint until the other file is published – then the first file will be overwritten. This means that a set of changes is completely lost.

One way to avoid this is to have all team members who plan to work offline follow best practices and develop a workflow to ensure that people check out the file and fetch the latest version of a file before making edits. However, it can still be tough for teams to avoid overwriting information. In those cases, we recommend always working within SharePoint, utilizing its out-of-the-box check-in/check-out mechanism to insure your files are locked for editing, and not allowing content to be overwritten when making changes.

Today, businesses are tasked with giving employees different ways to do work. However, each adjustment can bring about complications. What considerations do you need to take into account before you leap in?

Keith Prunella is a Solutions Architect at VMC Consulting. Contact Keith at keithpr@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.