Offline Files should be transparent to the user. For example, if you access
a redirected My Documents directory on the server when connected to the LAN,
when you're working offline you'll still go to File -> Open. You'll see the
same thing you do when connected to the LAN, but under the covers, you'll be
accessing offline copies of the files.

IMO the only real trick is that if a user has both a laptop and a desktop,
it's important to sync the laptop after traveling, before starting to work
on the desktop. Windows can deal with sync conflicts fairly well, but it's
still easier if you just avoid the conflicts in the first place.

You don't really need to access the files where you are in Windows Explorer
unless you're troubleshooting, or maybe trying to recover a file that's been
deleted from it's main location.


"Matthew" <mappleNOSPAMPLEASE@inch.com> wrote in message
news:eOsblG1xIHA.2184@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Hi. Sorry if I over cross-posted!
>
> I have one staff member who travels a lot, and she has historically
> manually copied her entire (2GB) User directory to her (XP) laptop before
> travelling.
>
> Over a few years, this resulted in about five different versions of her
> directory, a situation I want to prevent from happening again.
>
> So I looked into enabling offline files, the theory being that there would
> be an intelligent process managing the syncronization of files between her
> laptop and the server (Small Business Server 2003).
>
> However, when I enable this and open the Offline Files Folder, what we see
> is an unordered list of a gazillion files, not at all in their
> heirarchical directory structure. It's impossible to find something like
> this.
>
> Is there a better solution? Are we not using Offline Files properly? If
> she copies her entire directory
>
> Any input is greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matthew
>