New in Desktop Client with SP3

former_member186016 · ‎11-24-2014

With the SP3 release from SAP Mobile Documents, the Desktop Client gets enriched with many interesting and useful features.

In this blog I will take you through my favorite ones:

New glossy and responsive interface:

The user interface is now closer to native UIs. Hence you will see better UIs on Windows and Mac.

Also, when you start using the new Desktop Client you will find helpful icons everywhere.

The tree for the Selective Sync configuration is lazy loading and is very responsive now

Better performance

The logic to sync documents on the Desktop Client has been re-visited in SP3. The upload and download requests were minimized resulting into less band width consumption. Improvements:

Move or Rename do no longer trigger upload of documents

When office documents are edited, they are no longer downloaded in the background from the server

Earlier a document was downloaded locally to be compared with the local file. Now, if hashing is configured on the server the download doesn’t happen. Only the hash is compared.This prevent lots of downloads.

If change log is configured on server, the desktop client uses to find out changes on server storage. Hence, costly comparison of local file system content with server content, to calculated changes is avoided.

View Recently Changed Documents

The Desktop Client updates your local file system when documents are created, added or deleted on the server through the sync process. Users always missed the notification of what exactly got changed locally.

Now, you can access the Recently Changed dialog to view the last 50 changes. Right click on the tray icon for SAP Mobile Documents and select option “Recently Changed” to open the dialog. If you click on an entry in the dialog you will navigate to the respective document on your local file system.

Open in Web App

The Web App for SAP Mobile Documents has many features which are not yet available on the Desktop Client e.g. creating shares, adding members to shares, etc.

As a user I have always missed an option to quickly jump to the Web App out of the File Explorer. Now, you can right click on any folder or file and use action “Open in Web App” to quickly navigate to the file in your browser.

I can select a team share and navigate to the Web App quickly to do additional actions like add members, create public link, etc.

The URL which is opened in the browser can also be bookmarked to refer to the same document again.

This feature is only available on Windows devices.

Change the Mobile Documents Root Folder

In the past, users often requested a feature to change their Mobile Documents Root folder location. Now the Desktop Client allows you to change the root folder from within the Settings Dialog (see picture below). As an alternative you may also sync your content outside of SAP Mobile Documents. Read my How to sync content outside the Mobile Documents folder about how to sync content outside of the Mobile Documents Root folder to get more details.

Folders can be deleted when Removed from Auto-Sync

When a folder is removed from the auto-sync in the Selective Sync dialog, the user is asked if the Desktop Client should delete this folder from the local file system as well. Hence, the data in the Mobile Docs folders is exactly according to selections in Selective Sync dialog.

In our documentation you will find the complete list of new improvements.