You will no doubt have seen the new Server 2012 R2 feature whereby users can sync a folder to other devices using the internet as a conduit. At the time of writing Windows 8.1 has an inbuilt client and there is a feature limited Windows 7 client. The Windows 7 client requires the device to be domain joined, making it pretty unsuitable for BYOD, which seems to negate most of the benefits of using it. As most users are still using Windows 7 it is not brilliant solution. I am still surprised at the requirement for domain joining but there you go.
A crude and cheap solution is to set up Office 365 on the devicein question (most users have 5 activations so not a problem) and use Outlook 2013 (any version of Outlook 2003 onwards will also work but have more licensing implications) as an equivalent technology. Create a cached copy of the users email and create a new folder in say the Inbox root - how about calling it WorkFolders(!) or offlinefilecopies. Set up Outlook Anywhere (currently uses RPC over http) and you are done. How much easier is this than setting up and using a version 1.0 Work Folders solution? Most users don't need access to millions of files.
Show the user how to drag files into the new folder. Hey presto they will turn up in any other device with an Outlook cached copy set up. The classic use is the the user who has a desktop day to day and a lightweight laptop for going on the road. They copy all the useful files they need into the Outlook 'WorkFolders' directory, and can sync their laptop (which does not need to be on the domain as a matter of interest) over the internet including the files.
I use this frequently for such users and it works well. Obviously it has many limitations and does not scale brilliantly, but for users who don't have loads of large files it is a pretty good solution, and requires doing minimal or near to zero work.
What do you think?
