I'm working in a Windows 2003 Domain, with Win 7 Pro. Redirecting My Documents to \\server\share\%username%\My_Documents. And therefore this directory is set to be available offline. And that is working perfectly. However I'm seeing that under slow connection (VPN), where Windows decides to work with the offline copies (80 ms is the default I believe), nothing ELSE is available on \\server\share\%username% (which is mapped for the users as a drive). Windows seems to be assuming that if you are in offline mode to that server, then nothing should be available. Even when you do have a connection. Other servers are available. This was always the case with XP as well, and I chalked it up to poor design. I had to tell users to go online if they wanted those files. However I thought I saw that it was fixed (by practice, not by any documentation) in Win 7. At first I seemed to have everything available. But now I'm seeing the same old result. I'm hoping I just changed something without realizing it? Granted, with windows 7 I can set policy to raise the threshold so that these slower connections don't revert to working with offline copies. But I want to work with the offline copies for the often used My Docs. And I don't want to have to go through the work of isolating my docs to it's own server. Am I doing something wrong?

Can anyone even comment on whether or not they see this in the same way? I've got to think others would experience this same problem (perhaps everyone already knows better and isolates their folders which will be available offline to their own server). Really hoping to find an answer here that allows Windows 7 to recognize that while files on \\server\anything are available (through VPN), for files in that location that are available offline it should work with the offline copy. Thanks for any feedback at all.

It occurred to me that I could have what I wanted here by adding a CNAME in DNS to the same server, and then pointing that direction when making files available offline. This does the job of tricking offline files, which manages the locations strictly by UNC path. I did have to make a registry change in my Win 2003 server per this http://support.microsoft.com/?id=281308 to allow the connection, but that was easy enough, and this has solved an age old problem for me. In the end the solution is obvious... but it stumped me for a long time.

I think i have the same problem with slow-link. \\server\share\share2\%username%\ has been configured to be made offline when the connection is slower than 9 ms. The problems is that when slow-link is detected, not just \\server\share\share2\%username%\ is made available offline but also \\server\share\share2\groups. No caching has been configured for \\server\share\share2\group meaning you can no longer connect to \\server\share\share2\groups. You are saying that you worked around this (bug?) by creating an alias in DNS. Won't creating an alias lead to the exact same problem? I mean does it matter what is your servername is? Won't this bug also pull \\aliasserver\share\share2\groups offline which results in \\server\share\share2\groups being pulled offline aswell?

This work-around has been successful for me. It appears that offline files, both in XP & Win 7, work based on the UNC path... and specifically on the first name in that path. So I would expect that in your situation, anything on \\server would be unavailable when in offline mode. So if you had another path for something else called \\server\share2\share.... I would expect that to go to offline mode as well. This should have been apparent all along, because I could always get around the problem by navigating to the path using \\ip_address\share. But instead I fumbled with it for years. So in my case, I have several drives mapped to a single file server. J, L, P, S. My Documents was mapped to a folder inside of L, and made available offline. When that was working in offline mode, nothing was available in any of those drives except the my docs inside L. I created a CNAME in DNS which points to the same server, by name. And then changed my my documents to map to that new share (\\mydocs\%username%\...). Once I formatted the offline files db and ensured no more attempts to use the old server name for offline files, now everything is available when offline.