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Good morning everyone,

I work as an IT consultant for a local company where I live and the company I do most of my work for has recently moved everything from a file server structure over to Microsoft SharePoint. The reason for doing this is they have a lot remote offices and I think the other reason is that everything is one in spot so everyone can just find everything they need out on SharePoint.

They have several employees (seems to be mostly remote offices but not 100% sure) complaining about using SharePoint and the speed of it. Now I have been told by several of my colleagues that they shouldn’t be using SharePoint for file server type purposes as it “just doesn’t work that way”.

I guess the reason for me posting this here is, has anyone else worked at a company that has run into this and seems to be regretting moving everything over to SharePoint? Has anyone else seen a company do this? Is SharePoint really not meant to be used this way?

I was never really apart of moving everything over to SharePoint as I don’t know a lot about it. This was really head by the marketing department because he used to work at a company that had SharePoint and he was there “SharePoint Admin” I believe.

Any insight you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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I have worked in a similar environment to the one you describe. The issues I have encountered are all related to internet connectivity so it can be frustrating. On the other side SharePoint is not a file server, but it is designed to host files for use in the way you describe. One of the benefits to using SharePoint is its ability to index all files and the information in the files for quick searching.

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I would have to say that it depends upon the environment along with the needs of each department. We are currently moving files from our traditional file server to SharePoint but we also have a need for document management. We will still have a file server for those files that won’t work on SharePoint.

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What type of Internet connectivity issues did you run into? Just speed wise?

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Are you using SharePoint Online or hosting it yourself?

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SharePoint Online w/O365

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Primarily speed and also internet connectivity in general, as you are aware sometimes access to the internet can still be a challenge. MS provides the OneDrive for business tool which allows you to sync SharePoint files to your local machine similar to Dropbox. The only issue becomes the number of items in SharePoint. If you exceed the limit you cant sync with OneDrive for Businesss so configuration of the environment is critical to maintaining this ability.

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Age old question, file server or SharePoint? Been going through this for years trying to get company off old SharePoint onto new O365 SharePoint and what stays in SharePoint what goes on file server. Really ends up being how the users want to access it and what is easy for them. One thing that has come up surrounding our deployment/migration/quagmire is backups of O365 data. Gives a warm fuzzy knowing I have good backups of file server in case anything needs to be recovered vs. depending on MS and hoping their backup process is as good and easy as your own. If everything is put into SharePoint AND is indexed correctly then SharePoint is usually superior at serving those files. But if it is just mass uploaded and no indexing, no taxonomy used, then sticking with the file server is probably best.

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I feel like our remote offices are on a solid internet pipe. usually 60 down and 5-10 upload. It just seems to be really slow for them. I am starting to wonder if has to do with the wireless connections out at these remote locations…

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I’d also check the O365 SharePoint Admin area to see if you can add more resources to the site connection/s in question. This can drastically improve performance.

We have our 2 primary collections set to 7500 for SERVER RESOURCE QUOTA.

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sharepoint.JPG

Here is our quota right now. Potentially not enough?