Offline Files Syncronization

We have issues with our Offline files / Synchronization setup. User files
are stored on our local file server and user's 'My Documents' folder is
redirected to their 'user drive' (which is also mapped by a script to their
local U: drive). Once we remap their 'My Documents' folder to the user
drive, we then tell the system to make the 'My Documents' available offline.

As long as the user is connected to the office network, everything works
fine. They can open their files, edit them, save them, etc.

When they go home is another story. They log into there laptop and the
system notices that they are not connected to the office network and puts
their system into ‘Offline’ mode (computer icon appears in task bar). Once
they log onto the VPN the system (most times, not always) takes them into
‘Online’ mode and synchronizes their files.

The first issue is, the system doesn’t always detect when they log onto the
VPN and put their files into ‘Online’ mode. Most times we have to click on
the ‘Offline’ icon and tell it to synchronize the files. When we do this,
the system will most times get part way through the synchronization and then
stop and say ‘lost connection to server’. This is where it gets frustrating…

When it says that it’s lost connection to the server, we lose all of the
network drives that got mapped as well. They may show up under ‘My
computer’, but don’t have any contents. As many times as we run the
synchronization to get the system into ‘Online’ mode, it doesn’t ever get
through the synchronization.

We can ping the server(s) and get/send our Outlook emails (on a couple
occasions it stops the Outlook from connecting also).

I’ve checked firewall settings (disabled), connection strength (speed,
noise, etc) and can’t find anything at fault (at this time).

My only thought at this time would be the network IP settings. The servers
have the following;

IP Range: 10.80.0.xxx
Subnet: 255.255.252.0

VPN users get the following;

IP Range: 10.80.4.xxx
Subnet: 255.255.255.255

When a user is logged onto the VPN, we can’t ping the user unless we log
onto the VPN as well. I’ve been told this is a routing issue and our network
provider has taken care of this.

I’d like to know if we should change the Subnet mask on the servers to
255.255.248.0. With the 255.255.252.0 subnet, the IP range is only
10.80.0.1 – 10.80.3.254. With the 255.255.248.0 subnet, the IP range would
be 10.80.0.1 – 10.80.7.254.

Does the synchronization process look at/use these subnets/IP settings more
closely than, say Outlook?

What network resources does the synchronization process use?