Hello Mauro,
Offline Work Item support has been a huge request by many people in the TFS area. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to edit your work items while you are on a 4 hour flight for business? To answer your question we have to define what Offline Support really means. We [Personify Design] feel that using the broad term ‘Offline Support’ implicitly means ‘Full Offline Support’. TeamLook offers a ‘Partial Offline Support’ as I’ll describe below, and TeamSpec (Word Addin) offers an even more impressive offline story.
Full Offline Support:
In this case you have access to all your work items, all the history, and can edit those work items (or create new work items) without being connected to the server. This means having a client cache with the information from the server in sync with the server. From my knowledge, there are no products, by Microsoft or 3rd parties, that have this level of ‘Full Offline Support’.
Partial (or Read-Only) Offline Support:
Read-Only Offline Support is really just a snapshot of what the work items were at a given time on the Server. TeamLook has support for this high level of information. If you run the ‘All Tasks’ query while you are connected, we store the information that you see for viewing later. You cannot edit the work items, but you can still see whichever items are in your view. This view gives you a great representation of the status of your project and each folder is stored independently so you can run a bunch of queries before you disconnect. You can also completely customize which fields you see in your Outlook Reading pane to give you the most relevant information at the quickest possible speed. See below:
TeamSpec Offline Support:
The best experience you can achieve without Full Offline Support is what we provide in TeamSpec. Using word as the client repository, the changes you make to fields in a work item (represented as Content Controls inside word) are tracked and we allow you to then sync your document (both directions) back to the server. We have also exposed functionality to create new work items while you are offline through a ‘cloning’ mechanism. This way you can still mark sections of your document to be new items even without being connected to TFS! The full details of how useful this can be are best described through a demo or by watching our video’s posted at http://www.personifydesign.com/products/teamspec/discover.aspx
I hope this answers your question and if you have anything further, please don't hesitate to ask!
Thanks,
~Joe
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