I had always struggled to find a compelling use for Groove that related to my heavy use of structured data (Lists) but with SharePoint Workspace now supporting Windows Desktop Search, I think I have found the killer use for it (read: I'm really excited about this :-).

From Vista or Windows 7, you can add a search shortcut to the Workspace…

And then search directly from Windows Explorer…

And open an item directly from the search results…

To enable this, you need to Sync the list to a SharePoint Workspace from the List Tools ribbon as shown below.

(It would be nice if you could publish a link to initiate the creation of a workspace for a list, I suspect this uses the client OM rather than a URL Moniker. I will investigate this)

Note: if this is the first time you have used the SharePoint Workspace client there will be a few additional account setup steps.

You can then access the list data in the Workspace client.

Notes:

• I found that I had to experiment with the list views to find one that worked well for offline use.
• Group by views don't work as expected.
• Can't sort or filter on columns (need to create a lot more views or export to Excel).

To create a Desktop Search shortcut, click on the Search icon in the view above, search for *, and click Save Search.

Now I have a reason to complete all the SharePoint PowerShell commands and details in this list http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/PowerShell

You should be able to grab an offline copy of this list for yourself by using the guest logon corp\demouser pass@word1 but it looks like SharePoint Workspace requires contributor rights.