Deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 geographically

February 23rd, 2008 · No Comments

Greetings, my name is Brenda Carter. I am a technical writer who writes content for the IT Pro audience about Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services. The purpose of this blog entry is to tell you about the new guidance that our team recently published around deploying Office SharePoint Server globally.

The guidance is published as a series of articles on TechNet:

We’ll package these articles into a single downloadable file soon!

There are also a couple of poster-sized models that summarize some of the guidance:

First, I’d like to acknowledge the members of the consulting team and our product team who worked as a virtual team to develop this guidance:

Kimmo Forss, SharePoint Ranger (Consultant), Finland
Dino Dato-on, SharePoint Ranger (Consultant), Dallas, Texas, USA
Luca Bandinelli, SharePoint Ranger (Consultant), Italy
Steve Peschka, SharePoint Ranger (Consultant), Portland, Oregon, USA
Joel Oleson, SharePoint Technical Product Manager, Redmond, Washington, USA
Doron Bar-Caspi, SharePoint Program Manager, Redmond, Washington, USA

As you can see, the guidance on deploying Office SharePoint Server globally was produced as a collaborative effort across teams, feature specialists, and geographies.

Those of you who are familiar with our guidance on this topic for the previous product will appreciate the new additions for this product. Customers of the previous solution were particularly vocal in asking us to address two topics: latency and collaborating geographically. I’ll summarize our guidance around these two topics first and then introduce some of the other topics.

Latency and bandwidth

In the guidance for the previous product we provided a lot of useful bandwidth data. However, many of you were quick to let us know that we missed the latency piece. The bandwidth testing and data in our newly published guidance incorporates latency, the time it takes for data to travel from one end of a wide area network (WAN) connection to the other end.

The results of the bandwidth and latency tests indicate that latency plays a greater role in WAN performance than bandwidth until bandwidth becomes restricted at 512 kilobits per second and lower. For example, a T1 line with a latency of 500 milliseconds provides about the same performance as a T3 line with the same amount of latency. You can easily see where performance over a WAN degrades by looking at the performance graph below. This graph shows average page-load times for a range of bandwidth and latency combinations.

For best performance over a WAN, our recommendation is to target a bandwidth range of 3 megabits per second (Dual T1) or greater. Dino Dato-on conducted the lab testing at the Microsoft Testing Center in Austin and he provided the recommendations. For more information about the lab environment and test results, see Plan for bandwidth requirements.

Microsoft customers are welcome to use any of the MTC labs around the world or the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond to extend this testing to your own deployment scenarios. For more information, see the following:

Collaborating geographically

Another big request from customers using our previous solution was to provide more guidance around how to collaborate more efficiently when workers are spread across the globe. This solution includes guidance in two forms.

First, there are a couple of tools that can be used to extend SharePoint to the desktop when clients are offline or are working across unreliable WAN links. The easiest to implement is Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Users can connect to a SharePoint library directly from Office Outlook 2007 and take documents within the library offline. While offline, users can easily access, preview, search, and edit documents. When online, users can use Office Outlook 2007 to synchronize their changes. Users can also view and update SharePoint calendars and view and create tasks on a SharePoint site directly in Office Outlook 2007. These capabilities provide a personal offline experience and are not intended for offline collaboration with team members.

For team collaboration, consider using Microsoft Office Groove 2007. By deploying an Office Groove 2007 environment, global workers can collaborate on SharePoint sites even when not connected directly to the server farm. For more information, see Extending Office SharePoint Server global solutions with Office Outlook 2007 and Office Groove software.

While these tools can help team members work more efficiently across WAN connections, a big investment within the recently published solution guidance is in designing and information architecture and governance for global knowledge management. This topic is important for any environment, but it becomes even more critical in environments where multiple farms are deployed geographically. The Design global information architecture and governance article includes a design sample that illustrates a common knowledge-management scenario, where content that is created in multiple company locations is aggregated in a central location and then, if needed, synchronized (copied) out to all company locations. This design sample is summarized in the Global Knowledge Management model.

To develop this design sample, Kimmo Forss proposed a workflow based on his consulting experience in the portal space and I used his proposal to create a prototype on paper. Kimmo and I then reviewed the prototype with customers at a conference last October in Madrid. Finally, Kimmo developed a prototype tool using the publishing APIs to streamline the process of publishing documents from regional sites to a central site in WAN environments. The tool incorporates file compression for better WAN performance. If you are interested in guidance around creating your own custom tool or if you would like for the product teams to consider publishing Kimmo’s tool or a similar tool, let us know.

Supported global solutions

The guidance for the current product brings back the three recommended solutions from the previous product with updates for the current features and technologies, starting with a centralized solution and moving to more distribution where server farms are deployed to regional sites. Rather than trying to decide which of the solutions to target, think of each of the solutions as logical ways to scale out.

Central solution

First, try out the centralized solution in which a single central farm is deployed and all global offices connect to the central site.

Consider deploying additional server farms globally only if you cannot optimize the central solution to meet business needs. There are several key investments that you can make to improve WAN performance, and these investments might help you fit within the central solution—or at least reduce the number of regional farms to deploy. For more information see Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments.

Central with regional sites solution

If latencies are too great to serve business needs with a single central farm, then consider deploying additional server farms to regional sites.

In this solution, regional sites host collaboration, search, and My Sites locally. Users can connect to other server farms in the environment for global collaboration. While WAN links still play a role in the overall performance of the environment, the services that regional workers use most are hosted locally.

Distributed solution

The distributed solution incorporates a larger number of regional sites, each of which operates autonomously from other regional sites. This solution includes a centralized portal site, but the solution is not optimized for collaboration across regional sites. This is also where Windows SharePoint Services can play a role at regional sites, instead of deploying Office SharePoint Server.

The distributed solution is recommended for organizations that have many offices distributed geographically, such as branch offices.

For more information about each of these solutions see Supported global solutions for Office SharePoint Server.

Global enterprise search

If you do deploy more than one server farm globally, a primary architectural decision will be how to deploy search. There are several search architectures that are practical for WAN environments. These are discussed in Plan for global enterprise search.

If you implement a knowledge-management plan similar to the design sample described previously where content is synchronized across an environment, then a corresponding search architecture incorporates regional Shared Services Providers (SSPs) with local search.

In this design, all sites have a copy of content that has been targeted for enterprise-wide consumption, so there is no need to crawl content over the WAN.

If content is not synchronized across an environment, there are several options for providing search. Each of the options impacts WAN use in different ways. For more information, see Plan for global enterprise search.

Luca Bandinelli provided his expertise to develop the search architectures and to ensure that these work well with the recommended global solutions and the knowledge-management design sample. Also look for Luca’s recommendations on optimizing topologies for search and query performance and fine-tuning crawl rules and other search settings; see Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments.

Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments

Two articles focus on optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments:

The second article is self-explanatory. Guidance within the first article includes:

Designing topologies for the WAN (optimizing for search and separating farm servers geographically)
Optimizing the content crawling process
WAN accelerators and other third-party tools
Designing pages for quicker downloads
Optimizing caching for WAN environments

In particular, don’t miss the section on WAN accelerators and other third-party tools. Joel Oleson provided this content based on his research and knowledge of partner solutions.

Also, big contributions to the solution guidance for this product include the development recommendations provided by Steve Peschka: designing pages for quicker downloads, optimizing caching for WAN environments, and optimizing custom Web parts for the WAN.

Keep in mind that the bandwidth and latency tests were conducted in a baseline environment without any of these WAN optimization methods applied. Consequently, the bandwidth numbers represent the best possible performance in a clean environment with default pages and a small number of network devices between the server and client. The guidance around optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments can help you make smart design and development choices so your page-load times come closer to those produced in the clean environment. With some optimizations, such as implementing WAN accelerator devices, you might be able to beat the performance numbers produced in the lab environment.

Did we miss anything?

If you are one of the customers who provided feedback on the previous solution or who participated in the beta reviews of our current solution, thank you!

Our consulting and product teams are continuing to optimize our recommendations for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies globally. Let us know if we missed anything that is important for your global solution. Also, let us know if you have any feedback or questions on the guidance that is currently available.

Brenda Carter

Technical Writer, SharePoint User Assistance