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The team working on a single AEC project is often spread between multiple offices of a company. Our customers often ask about best practices for sharing project information in this type of environment. This document is an overview of the available options. Many Newforma customers have multiple office locations, each connected by a wide area network (WAN). An example deployment scenario is shown in the figure below. In this example, the customer has two offices. The Main Office has a Newforma Project Center (NPC) Server as well as a Newforma InfoExchange server. The Remote Office also has its own file server and NPC Server. When project teams are all located in the same office, things are very straightforward. Newforma projects are created on each office’s NPC Server, each NPC client and server refers to a set of files on the local office file server, and performance is optimal. NPC users only rarely have a need to open projects at other office locations, and any performance issues associated with remote office access are not critical. Things get more interesting when project teams are split between offices. This scenario is becoming more and more common because of economic conditions that require AEC companies to fully-utilize their available staff, and because of network infrastructure improvements that allow shared work between offices. Since WAN connection speed can significantly affect application performance, customers are often interested in understanding the configuration options available for supporting remote office teams. There are several possibilities, each seeing some customer use today.   Access Projects Remotely When there is a high-bandwidth, low latency connection between offices, accessing projects by opening them across the WAN may have acceptable performance without any configuration changes. However, WAN performance varies widely among our customers. At the high end of the performance spectrum, an MPLS network may be used between corporate offices. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS for a description of this technology.) Some of our customers with this type of network connection report virtually no difference in working locally versus working on projects hosted at another office location. It is more common to find a standard IP Internet connection, T1 class or better, connecting customer offices. These connections are then used to create a VPN tunnel between offices. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN for a description of this technology.) This configuration may offer reasonable speed, if the offices are not located far apart, if bandwidth is sufficient, and if routers are optimally configured. However, physical distance and the number of ‘hops’ required to reach a remote office can often create a fairly slow WAN experience. In general, if users aren’t satisfied with WAN speed when editing CAD or other office documents, they will be disappointed with NPC performance when accessing Newforma projects across the WAN. Adding WAN optimization products can improve the performance of a standard IP connection between offices. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAN_optimization for a description of this technology.) Many of our customers are using products such as Riverbed Steelhead appliances to improve network performance. We have used these devices at Newforma too and use them for testing NPC performance across the WAN. See Riverbed configuration for one important Riverbed configuration issue.   Use File Replication File replication solutions are available which provide a transparent, automated way to keep files synchronized between offices. The big advantage to file replication is that all project data is available locally and can be accessed at LAN speeds. Multiple copies of each file exist, one at each office location, which can be useful as part of a disaster recovery strategy. Some file replication solutions keep all versions up-to-date by transferring only the changed bytes each time the file is saved. This creates less network traffic as compared to full file copy solutions. The leading technology in this area is Microsoft Windows Distributed File System (DFS), which is part of the Windows Server operating system. See Distributed File_System (Microsoft) for a description. Another vendor that is often used by our customers is GlobalScape, which acquired Availl and rebranded the technology as GlobalScape WAFS (http://www.globalscape.com/wafs/). GlobalScape adds the capability to enforce Windows file-locking across a WAN. There are restrictions to file replication when used in conjunction with NPC projects. Newforma Project Center, like most database applications, relies on exclusive write access to a coordinated group of data files in a single location. This access paradigm can’t be supported by file replication. Consequently, customers cannot use NPC to operate on replicated Newforma project data. (This restriction applies to the “.prj” files and all the contents of the Newforma data directory with the same name as the “.prj” files.) Note that replication of these Newforma files only for disaster recovery purposes is supported. Some replication solutions can provide the same UNC path to files at each office location. Even though users at both offices refer to the same UNC path, the file is served up from the file server closest to the end user. Recall that NPC users must open the single copy of the Newforma project data that has not been replicated. In this type of WAN environment, certain NPC operations will be faster than if NPC were used across the WAN without local file replication. Since Newforma stores file references as UNC paths, all file references resolve to the locally replicated version automatically and as a result will have improved performance. For example, a user that selects a file from the NPC Project Files activity center for editing will operate on the local version of that file. Search results refer to UNC file paths that will resolve to local files too.   Create a separate project for remote office use Project work is often divided in some way between office locations. For example, a remote office might work on the structural design of a project while the main office is responsible for the rest of the project. In these cases, it can be reasonable to create a separate Newforma project at the remote office site. That project can be used by remote office team members for project information management on the subset of data being edited at their location. Remote office users may be able to work with the local project for most of their day-to-day activities. If they need to refer to the main project, it would be opened over the WAN. This approach can be effective both with and without a separate file replication solution.   Sharing project email with remote office projects Some customers create separate projects for remote office use, but setup file replication so that project email can be shared between the related projects. This works because the Newforma Project Email activity center creates its view of project email by ‘summarizing’ all of the .msg files found in the project folders. If file replication is used to copy email messages stored by each project into a folder visible by the other project, email messages filed from either project will be displayed in both projects.   Future Plans for Newforma Remote Office Support Newforma is committed to further improvements in remote office project support in future versions of our product. We are developing a Project Mirror feature that will work in conjunction with customer-supplied File Replication. This feature will allow remote offices to have a read-only cache of the Newforma project data stored on their local NPC server. This capability should allow WAN users to have NPC performance similar to main office users. http://www.newformant.com/index.php/121/