WebDAV, Branch Offices and Sharepoint 2007

Given the numerous options a customer has to plan an enterprise wide storage architecture it is not easy to decide about. But during the last 24 months a lot of customers have thought about their enterprise architecture in general and their branch office infrastructure in detail.

Some have chosen to continue to use SMB/CIFS with the help of DFS and delta-replication in R2 and may have even invested in helper technologies from several 3rd parties which offer “branch office boxes” to help cache SMB traffic. These customers will benefit a lot from the upcoming Vista client replication and offline capabilities offered with the Vista release of CSC.

But on the other hand especially the large enterprises do not want to continue the heavy investments of redundant server islands in sometimes hundreds of branch offices and these customers search for combined enterprise storage and document platform solutions which could be offered from products like SharePoint 2007. A lot of good arguments could make this plan working:

• There’s a trend to NOC service centric infrastructures driven by the concepts of the Jericho group and evangelists like Microsoft’s Steve Riley called the “death of the perimeter”. Consolidating the enterprise infrastructure services (storage, collaboration, etc) in secured network operation centers and offering these services to desktop and mobile clients worldwide.

• There’s a general understanding to use more intelligent file servers with collaboration and workflow capabilities

• There are a lot of Microsoft Evangelists praying to use SharePoint instead of file servers
  

• Only WebDAV offers encrypted network transport when not using IPSec

That said it is an attractive strategy to plan upcoming infrastructures around SharePoint 2007. There is a lot of uniqueness against competition in such an infrastructure and it would be a win-win for Microsoft and its customers: The customer can benefit from a streamlined, very productive and scalable architecture and Microsoft establishes the fundament for a long term Vista/Office/Server environment.

But instead of investing in a good implementation of WebDAV as an alternative approach for enterprise storage the reality in XP and Vista shows an unfinished WebDAV client:

• WebDAV/EFS support in Vista results in instant deterministic crashes which leads to the assumption that it was not even worth testing to Microsoft QA

• WebDAV/Windows Explorer often freezes the Explorer when used in copy operations and makes it instable or even unusable

• WebDAV/CSC (Offline Folders) is not implemented at all. That means the very important technology to work with server documents while on the road is not possible with SharePoint. (The alternative approach to sync with Outlook 2007 has several caveats worth to write a separate document – most obvious the missing possibility to create documents while offline; Similar caveats exist when used with Groove).

Conclusion: Microsoft would offer an attractive technology with SharePoint/Office System 2007 in combination with Microsoft Vista if the underlying technology in Vista would support the obvious need to work with documents the way users are expecting: secure, stable and ready for mobile usage.