Word templates over a WAN

[Bill McLean]

I have a client that has an interesting problem.

The IT department wants control over templates that are installed on their
corporate intranet. The network is broken up into several LANs operating at
100Mbs that are interconnected using a WAN at 7Mbs. They also have users
that connect to the intranet using either dialup/broadband using a VPN. All
templates are stored on their central server and they have the path to the
templates set for each individual user using the Workgroup templates.

A user that creates/uses a document that uses the template from the LAN
experiences a 2 to 3 second delay. This user A saves the document and sends
to user B that is on a different segment of the WAN. When user B opens the
document then the open will take 20 to 30 seconds to complete. Each of the
templates is running some VBA. Some users experience wait times of upto 20
minutes when opening a document.

My guess is that when the document is opened by user B it is trying to
reference the template that is on user A's segment of the WAN.

I have the following recommendations for the client:

1) Replicate the servers for each of the segments such that the template is
resolved to the local LAN.

2) Deploy the templates to each and every client machine on their network.
Provide an installer that each user will use to install on each individual
system.

Any thoughts or comments?

 

[Malcolm Smith]

2) Deploy the templates to each and every client machine on their
network. Provide an installer that each user will use to install on
each individual system.

Go for this option.

Have a login script written on the server which is executed when someone
logs in that copies the templates to the user's hard drive to the Good Old
Fashioned folders of Word 97 days.

A piece of cake and it means that it works all the time, traffic on the
network is minimal and also those without a connection (i.e. the man on
the train or in the pub) can write documents.

- Malc