Not long ago geographic distribution was considered a problem for only the large, multi-national corporations and governmental organizations. With increased access to commodity bandwidth even small and medium sized business are able to not only reap the benefits of a geographically distributed workforce but also feel its pains. This scenario also goes by the name of “the branch office scenario.” There are two main types of portal implementations that arise in the geographically distributed document authoring:
· Central SharePoint farm with large number of personal accessing SharePoint over a wide area network (WAN)
· Multiple local SharePoint farms
The main challenge with the central SharePoint farm implementation is that the large number of remote users (with respect to the farm) accessing SharePoint over the WAN. While an organization may have 1000 Mbps local area network (LAN) the organization’s WAN bandwidth is usually less than 10 Mbps, less than 1% of the LAN bandwidth. This bandwidth seems even smaller when considering that a typical document can easily reach 8 Mb (1 MB). With this implementation, organizations find themselves either having to procure expensive WAN bandwidth or WAN optimization equipment.
The docBlock Ascend’s virtual document implementation offers a more elegant solution to WAN bandwidth limitations: don’t force a user to download or upload the entire 8 Mb file when the user is only interested in reading or editing a .5 Mb portion of the file. By virtualizing a document and partitioning it into multiple smaller parts, content managers can easily structure their documents to be more WAN-friendly and usable by remote users.
As with the central portal implementation the main challenge to the multiple local SharePoint farms implementation is lack of WAN bandwidth. However rather than forcing many users to access SharePoint over a WAN, this implementation creates local pockets of SharePoint service near centers of user population. This type of implementation usually involves some form of content replication to make sure that all farms have a consistent copy of global or enterprise content. The challenge with this implementation is minimizing occurrences of and dealing with replication conflicts when users from multiple farms need to edit the same logical document.
docBlock Ascend eases both issues by allowing content managers to virtualize documents and partition the virtual documents into multiple document parts. The key is that SharePoint and the replication technology sees each document part as an individual file. With the docBlock the document is no longer the smallest replicable unit of data, the document part is. When a user edits a virtual document, the user edits just the document part. Because only a portion of the document has changed and the replication technology can map the change into a more granular replicable unit (the document part), document part edits cause far fewer replication conflicts between users on multiple farms than do whole document edits. When replication conflicts do occur, the scope of the conflict is a document part, not the entire document. This makes the conflict much more narrow and easy to resolve. The docBlock Ascend further minimizes potential replication conflicts by allowing content managers to assign different document parts to different users. The docBlock Ascend also stores all task assignments in SharePoint lists. This allow any SharePoint replication software to replicate virtual document task status and assignment to remote SharePoint farms right along with the virtual document parts to which the tasks relate. With proper virtual document partitioning and document part task assignments, content managers can make replication conflicts the exception rather than the rule in the multiple SharePoint farm implementations for the geographically distributed document authoring scenario.
Read more about advanced document management usage scenarios that docBlock Ascend virtual documents enables on the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 platforms:
Download the Enhancing SharePoint Document Management with Virtual Documents black paper (registration required). The black paper discusses several key document management usage scenarios enabled through docBlock Ascend's virtual document enhancements to the SharePoint platform.
Ready to bring the power of docBlock Ascend to your document management experience? Get pricing and a no-obligation quote today.
For more information on the docBlock Ascend, please download the docBlock Ascend product brochure or contact sales@blackbladeinc.com / +1-703-260-1111. See the docBlock Ascend in action by scheduling a live web demo, or attend a public webinar, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm EST.