SharePoint Performance in Remote Offices
One of the great selling points around MOSS is the promise of increased organizational collaboration. What does that mean? In simplest terms, collaboration technology makes it easier for employees to be content consumers AND producers. MOSS makes it easier for the employee to find, discover, submit, repurpose, and share content. It establishes a "connectivity" among the orgnanizational community. This a fantastic knowledge management principle. Sometimes, however, it is also a tough thing to deliver...
For organizations that are geographically dispersed, making the statement that SharePoint will deliver the same collaborative benefits to ALL employees is a tough delivery. How can you ensure that a user in Sydney will share the same user experience (from a performance perspective) as someone in Boston or London or Hong Kong? Will MOSS make collaboration among these employees easier?... or will it highlight the technology deficiencies that make file download times too long to accept? Of course, there are ways to fix this. Regional SharePoint servers is an option. Web accelerators (Certeon is a good example) are another alternative. How do you know if you need these? When? This has an impact on your MOSS server topology... current and future.
To get started, collect some metrics. Where, geographically, do you care about web application performance and file downloads? What will performance be like there? Answering the second question just got a little easier. There is a new project on CodePlex that allows you to collect client analytics on some simple SharePoint file downloads tests. This is a GREAT way to gather solid data about what performance looks like across your user community. The data will help business decision makers use real information in order to decide whether to choose acceleration or regional server or doing no more. Great tool!
Find it here: http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sptoolbox&ReleaseId=8366
CopyTimer is a SharePoint utility which performs a series of timed download/upload tests to a SharePoint server and records various additional information about the client computer including latency, network connection, ip address, etc... Results are posted to a specified SharePoint list as well as saved in a local XML file.
The files used for download/upload and some other options are configurable so you can run against any three files (different size, type, etc..) and easily modify the application to run in your SharePoint environment. It can be run from any client running Windows and it uses the WebDav protocol for file transfers.
CopyTimer is useful for calculating real world estimates of performance to SharePoint servers.