As Microsoft has released the public beta of Office 2013, it’s time to think about some evolution.
I had the chance to start playing with the beta long time before it became public and so I saw the evolution from Office 2010 to Office 2013 of each component.
In this post, I would like to share my feelings about the new “SharePoint Workspace” called SkyDrive Pro.
This time I’m really frustrated with SkyDrive Pro.
Indeed, there are TOO many limitations with this product, while his predecessor SharePoint Workspace was able to do:
- no ability to keep SharePoint list available offline
- SharePoint library size limit too restricted and not manageable
- no way to synchronize the SharePoint content if you are not connected to CorpNet if you configured SkyDrive with SharePoint internal URL
- trouble to keep SharePoint 2010 content available offline; this was due to a cache corruption (????) and was solved but as I was not the only one, it seems this part is not ready yet
- it is not possible to create new document based on SharePoint document content type; if you want to create new document based on document content type, you MUST DO it from SharePoint (what the XXXX off ??)
- ability to create ‘peer to peer’ share (ie without being obliged to pass through SharePoint) disappears
The only positive point I found is SkyDrive is integrated with Windows 8 client at the Favorites level (you can view your cached content directly from Explorer).
With this very few elements, I would not recommend to upgrade to Office 2013/SkyDrive Pro to my customers. At this stage of the beta, it is still possible to keep SharePoint Workspace 2010 with Office 2013 but I’m not pretty sure for the RTM release as well as how it will coexist (you may already know that having different pieces of different Office version is always problematic).
I was not a big fan of SharePoint Workspace but with this release this is really a mess.
Event if the other part of Office 2013 are fine, there is no real big changes and this SkyDrive Pro is really a BIG negative point.
It is important to Microsoft to start hearing customers and learn about real world experience!!!