Even though we now count on nearly ubiquitous Internet connectivity and bandwidth, many legacy Notes applications depend on the ability to go offline. Notes has always been famous for its ability to replicate whatever data you needed to your laptop and (assuming your application was designed to work that way) enable you to continue working while unplugged, such as on the airplane, at the customer site, or at the vacation home where you can’t access the Internet.
With SharePoint Workspace 2010, you can synchronize lists, libraries and entire sites to your laptop, use them offline, and then sync up with the site the next time you are connected. This includes not only the data, but much of the logic of the site (including custom data entry forms), resource data (such as Lookup lists that your application depends on) and more. When you click the “Sync to My Computer” button, you can choose to download everything (the default), just the application but not the content, or a customized selection of available content.
SharePoint Workspace includes a lot of smarts about how application functionality should work when users go offline. For example, certain workflow operations will execute only when new documents are posted back to the server. Also, the offline application will try to connect to an online resource that the user decided not to replicate locally (so offline does not have to be all or nothing).