I'm curious to hear from the community.  There is obviously a huge gap in aligning SharePoint with geographically distributed environments. There are an increasing number of products that address this scenrio through replication, WAN compression, and other approaches.

What products are out there, and what is the community's experience with them?

NOTE!!!!  I will be moderating this forum. While I'm definitely interested in hearing from vendors as well, please don't just post all your product specs and PDF-like information. Instead, carry on a human discussion.  Also, I really want to hear from those of you who use the products. If you've had great experiences, share them. If you've had poor experiences, share those too.  Just please be civil and professional--I have low tolerance for "flames" :-)

Over here at Digilink, we wanted to throw our hat in the ring.   Digilink Revelation 2008 will easily meet this requirement.

  " .........The scenario is about as simple as they come. A single document library needs to be replicated from one site to another. One way. Simple. But mission critical......"

In answer to your newsletter question, you certainly can use robocopy or other similar programs to write directly to SharePoint.  In fact, SharePoint supports WebDAV right out of the box; you don’t need a third party tool for this.  As long as the tool can save to a UNC path, you can do this.  However, I don't think Robocopy would be the best choice for file replication. 

One of the neatest tools around (and Microsoft gives it away) is called Logparser.  I’ve used it before to parse server logs and generate Excel charts and other reports on server activity (including event log errors) and post them directly to a SharePoint site that I configured as a dashboard.  One glance at the SharePoint site, and I can see how my servers are doing.  While this is not exactly about replication, it is about data acquisition in a distributed environment, and its very useful.  

Personally, I  do like Colligo for replication.  I’m implementing it at a client site to replicate a lot of data from SharePoint onto laptops that are mounted in the city’s police cars.  The police officers can get up-to-date floor plans of apartment buildings, hotels and schools to aid in emergency response.  While the computer usually has network access, Colligo enables the officer to get at the data even when they can’t get a live signal via the wireless connection. 

I haven't used Revelation, but I like how it's transparent to the user.

Mike Sharp

Collaboration People, Inc. 

rdcpro@hotmail.com 

There is an interface to Revelation.  It's just that its use is optional.  The user gets a folder in My Documents (or wherever) that's a replication of all the documents in a target site or sites.  Some users don't even actively use SharePoint.  All the files from a team-site just 'turn up' on their computer for them to use.

 BTW.  Wasn't trying to be anonymous.  Just a tad late when I was typing.

Ivor Share - Digilink Limited   www.digi-link.com 

ivor@digi-link.com

Hello there...

Yes you can replicate or backup sharepoint stuff using RoboCopy (or even Xcopy) without any extra tools. The webdav folder is there already, and you can just copy from it as if you were copying actual file system objects. In fact at our site I demonstrated this to help people feel less anxious about documents being stored in SQL Server - just open up the web folder, copy, and see....? There are all your files!

I can't see any reason for getting a third party tool for replication except this: RoboCopy (or whatever) will replicate your documents, but it won't do lists. (Incidentally we were sold Backup Exec 11 as the total SharePoint backup solutiom, but that doesn't backup lists either!)

Cheers, John

Many of Certeon’s customers have had great success in accelerating the response time of documents and page rending over the WAN using our S-Series application acceleration appliances. This includes accelerating many other applications that are being accessed via HTTP/HTTPS within SharePoint infrastructures. We’ve seen customers’ response times of more than 3 minutes, be reduced to less than 6 seconds, an over 96% improvement.

These results are achieved by using more than just compression and protocol optimization techniques. It is an internal knowledge (a “blueprint”) of SharePoint protocols and schematics that enable the S-Series to deliver this performance. Greater knowledge of SharePoint as an application enables us to reduce and optimize the SharePoint traffic going over the WAN, thus dramatically decrease the application response times.

How our customers have used SharePoint collaboration and enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructures may differ, such as: the number of remote sites they are accessing, the size of the files, the amount of network latency, or the types of applications they are accessing, but the results seem to be the same – faster access to SharePoint applications enables greater productivity.

Once SharePoint customers remove the negative effects of the WAN on their applications, they can expand their ECM and collaborative infrastructures to more remote users. It is worth looking at Certeon customer case studies to see how maximizing the acceleration of SharePoint application access can impact your business. Go to http://www.certeon.com/customers/customer_case_studies.asp. 

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

I work in an internal organization supporting offices throughout Central and South America and who use a SharePoint portal hosted in our data center.  We evaluated a number of web acceleration devices.  We decided to use the Certeon line of products.  

We ran scripts using a tool call iMacro which allowed us to create a baseline of web performance from the user viewpoint.  Using this tool, we gather baseline performance from all offices.  We then purchased Certeon switches for those having the poorest response time.  After installing the switch, we run the same performance tests.

The improvement has been consistent in all instillations.  Times to load a SharePoint page improved from an average of 45 seconds to 18 seconds. The time to save an entry on a list improved from 43 seconds to 9 seconds.

The Certeon solution has worked well for us.