SharePoint Tip of the Month

August 2008: Remote SharePoint Acceleration

Microsoft SharePoint Services provide a rich suite of team productivity tools; however, they do not overcome the most common performance limitations that may prevent your users from leveraging the investment, (i.e. congested pipes and long distances). With just one participant working from a remote location, live collaboration on shared documents can quickly become a strain on all participants, even those on the same network as the SharePoint server. To alleviate slow file operations and screen refreshes, the only approach many IT managers have is to provide costly bandwidth expansion projects only to learn that bandwidth alone could not solve the problem of network latency. To use SharePoint as it was intended, it is essential to provide quick document check-in/check-out performance to all team members, regardless of their geographical distance from the server.

WAN optimization addresses these issues and provides the following benefits:

1. Improved productivity: Microsoft SharePoint Services over the WAN can now be significantly accelerated. By dramatically reducing the time needed to complete the most typical operations, users can save hours each day.
2. Faster, more efficient collaboration: By reducing the time to conduct common operations with Microsoft SharePoint by an order of magnitude or more, WAN optimization enables users in multiple offices to check in and check-out shared data at accelerated speeds, allowing team members to collaborate more fluidly.
3. Reduced bandwidth utilization: Significantly reduce bandwidth utilization for remote offices utilizing Microsoft SharePoint, thus reducing IT costs.
4. Simpler SharePoint deployment: Enable accelerated performance to remote offices from a central SharePoint server. Multiple SharePoint instances and complex replication models can be consolidated without compromising performance to even the most remote branch.