As both a SharePoint user in large multi-national enterprises and as a product developer with Colligo Networks my experience is that solutions to this problem often relate to a tradeoff between the features, functionality and services which can be made available to the client side and to the precision to which the user can segment the data on the SharePoint site

No products offer consistent benefits in all scenarios. And the end user experience often dedicates the solution or combinations or solutions used.

If the end user requires access to full site content all of the time then infrastructure centric solutions are indicated such as local site replication, server caching, WAN accelerators, etc. which can address the content access time. Similarly if the user needs the full richness of SharePoint then transport optimization (usually in the network) can assist. These solutions also apply if the user community cannot be segmented and so a pervasive solution is required.

If the end users or groups of users can partition the content they need access to or if they can employ varying degrees of functionality reflecting the quality of connection then a range of client side options become available.

Colligo's Contributor product is a client side solution which does not rely on infrastructure or server side changes.  It provides a rich client access to the major features of SharePoint which enable a structured view of the content (list, views, metadata) to be exported to the client side such as used in many ECM deployments. It also balances varying quality of connection by providing caching and synchronization capabilities to enable user configurable portions of the SharePoint sites to be made available in offline, occasionally connected and online modes.

While not built just to address this issue Contributor does offer significant benefits in this scenario while retaining the level of application demanded in many enterprise deployments.  

Dave

dfoster@colligo.com

www.colligo.com