How to Synchronize SharePoint Content Everywhere
Microsoft SharePoint has become the global standard for enterprise content management. The amount of content stored and accessed through SharePoint is growing by leaps and bounds at a rate of roughly 75% every year. As the amount of content grows, so does its importance to enterprise users. Users need access to this critical information, at various times and locations.
As such, one of the challenges facing global enterprises is ensuring that SharePoint content is constantly up-to-date and synchronized for all end users. The days of a single SharePoint deployment for one office are largely extinct. Most SharePoint deployments now have multiple farms and many must provide content, in real-time, to users that could be thousands of miles away from headquarters.
SharePoint has grown to become a truly global product on every continent. There are users around the globe that are leveraging SharePoint to access and share documents, even in Antarctica. But without synchronizing content, none of it would be possible.
Antarctica New Zealand
A prime example of how unsynchronized SharePoint content can undercut productivity comes from Antarctica New Zealand, the Crown Entity of New Zealand responsible for executing government activities and research in Antarctica. The organization uses SharePoint as its primary information and collaboration platform for interaction between its head office in Christchurch, New Zealand and Scott Base, its research facility located in Antarctica.
It is not exactly a stretch to imagine the difficulty with successfully collaborating on content in Antarctica through SharePoint, such as the distance from headquarters, the continent's climate and a lack of SharePoint infrastructure at the remote location. The challenge was made especially difficult because they needed to share information securely between offices with firewalls over a low bandwidth (64/256k), high latency (300ms) satellite data link.
While Antarctica New Zealand knew it had to synchronize content in real-time, especially for research, the native functionality in SharePoint would not support what they needed. The most important aspect for Antarctica New Zealand was the ability to replicate a document's workflow state and status, which allows its team to share research as it's being conducted to where and when it's needed. Without that, the organization would risk losing critical information and missing the latest research data.
Antarctica New Zealand's situation reveals one of the greatest concerns with SharePoint deployments that are located far away from headquarters—remote users will almost always have limited network access. Whether due to being on another continent or at sea, the poor connection can lead to trouble.
Like a storm looming in the distance, unsynchronized SharePoint content can have serious and dire implications if you are not prepared. If content appears available and current to your end users but is actually old and out-of-date, you run the risk of violating compliance regulations and negatively affecting productivity.
Within SharePoint, the only way to synchronize content is at the database level, which enables organizations to keep the same content available to end users. However, it fails to synchronize information such as versioning, workflows and metadata. This is more suited for a backup or recovery scenario. Unfortunately, many organizations are unaware of alternative methods, thus making the lack of native functionality for content synchronization a hidden obstacle for businesses.
The issues with unsynchronized content are multiplying, in part, because SharePoint adoption is likewise growing across organizations. The release of SharePoint 2013 will only stimulate this growth further, both in the number of users and the amount of content. For organizations on older versions, such as SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007, the move to SharePoint 2013 will likely bring more users to the platform in more locations.
Another challenge associated with SharePoint 2013 is that companies must keep content in sync across different versions. There are many organizations that are now managing SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 farms simultaneously. In the very near future, it is very likely these same organizations must manage three versions—2007, 2010 and 2013—while ensuring the content is similar across all of them.
With these challenges in mind, it is crucial to plan out your SharePoint farm topology to enable maximum synchronization, adoption and collaboration. The amount of content in SharePoint and the number of users are only going to increase and unsynchronized content is an often overlooked, yet very real problem for enterprises today.
If you plan accordingly and prepare your SharePoint environment for synchronization, you can eliminate these dangers and have all of your users-regardless of location-collaborating on the same version of the same document in real-time.
Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For more than a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organizations manage terabytes of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, more than 7,500 customers rely on the company's products to upgrade, migrate, organize, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and cloud platforms.
Metalogix Replicator synchronizes content across multiple SharePoint farm locations, environments and versions. It delivers remote users the same speed and performance as at headquarters, even across poor networks. It allows organizations to share select content with customers and partners. By replicating content across multiple farms, Replicator prevents downtimes during power, system or network failures and planned outages such as software or hardware refreshes. For more information on the Metalogix Replicator product, visit www.metalogix.com/replicator or call 877-450-8667 or visit www.metalogix.com.