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 →