Offline Files isn't smart when reconnecting without sync

[Walter Horowitz]

I had a customer that had a problem that I need to describe because Offline
Files caused a problem that it could have avoided today.

The customer was working Offline and his machine crashed. He rebooted and
went online without synchronizing. He had a great scare when all of the work
he had done before the crash seemed to have been lost. This was two days of
work.

Of course, all we had to do is synchronize and his work reappeared. It only
cost him a big scare, an hour of lost time and one chargable tech support
call.

I am writing this because I think that Offline Files could have been
designed to avoid this problem or at least alert the user that there might
be a problem. Why couldn't file open check for a newer version in the cache
before using the version on the server? A superior offline files function
would present a merged File List between the cache and the online files so
the user would always see the most recent files even when things were not
synchronized.

This is a suggestion for an improvement. Perhaps if I could tell a customer
that this was one if the improvements in Vista, then I would be able to get
more business users to move from XP to Vista.

Walter Horowitz
Mardovar Networking

 

[Bob I]

This is a user to user forum. Many issues and confusion occur when users
don't pay attention to what they are doing.

Walter Horowitz wrote:

> I had a customer that had a problem that I need to describe because Offline
> Files caused a problem that it could have avoided today.
>
> The customer was working Offline and his machine crashed. He rebooted and
> went online without synchronizing. He had a great scare when all of the work
> he had done before the crash seemed to have been lost. This was two days of
> work.
>
> Of course, all we had to do is synchronize and his work reappeared. It only
> cost him a big scare, an hour of lost time and one chargable tech support
> call.
>
> I am writing this because I think that Offline Files could have been
> designed to avoid this problem or at least alert the user that there might
> be a problem. Why couldn't file open check for a newer version in the cache
> before using the version on the server? A superior offline files function
> would present a merged File List between the cache and the online files so
> the user would always see the most recent files even when things were not
> synchronized.
>
> This is a suggestion for an improvement. Perhaps if I could tell a customer
> that this was one if the improvements in Vista, then I would be able to get
> more business users to move from XP to Vista.
>
> Walter Horowitz
> Mardovar Networking
>
>