I was approached by a client recently with an interesting query around SharePoint WAN performance. The client in question had a server farm located in the UK, but wanted to access their SharePoint sites from a branch office in Australia. They were surprised that download speeds were significantly slower from the Australian branch office in comparison to those located in the UK. Slow downloads over a WAN link certainly isn’t a problem that is specific to SharePoint – but it’s certainly relevant given that sharing office documents is core functionality. In my experience, users sometimes forget or don’t realise that when a document is “opened”, it is first downloaded to their client. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Why you MUST document your SharePoint farm configuration
11/09/2010 Update: Sean McDonough has written about I highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in ensuring your SharePoint 2010 farm configuration is documented.
I was reading through a forum post this evening from a user in the SharePoint community that was . The OP described his attempt to backup and restore his farm using the in-built recovery tools within Central Administration, and I answered the query initially by offering up the backup and restore SQL tools as an alternate method of taking a full fidelity farm backup (which I have used in the past with success). Continue reading
Real world PowerShell usage in SharePoint 2010
Using PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 administration seems to be very fashionable these days. It’s faster and more powerful than STSADM, and is now the de facto standard for administration across the latest server products from Microsoft. Whilst I’m not going to quote a clichéd line about power and responsibility, I figured that it would be worth closing my VM’s SharePoint 2010 management shell for a few minutes and coming back down to earth for a level headed look at PowerShell, with some perspective on anticipated “real world” usage. Continue reading