SharePoint In 2 Locations - any way of making fast for both?

Question

Our company has offices in the US and the UK. We have a MOSS 2007 SharePoint installation which is located in the US but both UK and US use and share the same content.

As a result, our UK office finds the speed at which SharePoint runs really slow and so that gives a bad user experience.

Is there anything that can be done to make it quick from both sides? Would we need to do data replication across the Atlantic?

I'd love to know how other companies cope with this kind of problem

Thanks

Answer 1

Microsoft TechNet has some guidance in this area that I have found helpful in the past.

Generally you have a global farm and then more local farms for the teams close to where they work.

Answer 2

In many cases, your best solution may be splitting up the servers across regions. Possibly, you may set up more than one farm, but share resources, like search across multiple farms. It really depends on latency and bandwidth available to your users.

There is a good SharePoint Product Team Post on Deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 geographically with all of the relevant links to TechNet Guidance and some notes about how they came to write it. Especially nice in the post are the 3 map diagrams of the 3 ways they group solutions to this problem.

It's interesting to note that Microsoft faces this issue internally with one of the largest SharePoint deployments in the world and a workforce distributed across Europe, Asia and America.