Q: I have 200 trainers at my company, dispersed throughout the world. Many of these trainers need to be able to work offline but still have access to our training materials. I'd like to set them up with a document library view that's been filtered for the documents they need. They can then drag the document to a folder on their desktops for use offline. How can I do this?
A: The business problem you describe is quite common; unfortunately, SharePoint offers no simple solution. However, I have good news. Colligo Networks has created Colligo Reader for SharePoint, a product that does exactly what you're looking for. The better news is, if your disconnected users need a read-only view, the Colligo Reader is free. You can find out more about the product and download it at http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/index.asp.
Note that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 gives users the ability to perform offline synchronization of content. Therefore, in this scenario, the trainers could subscribe to the document library from Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and have offline cached content that they can edit and later upload to the server.
