Hi all,
I wanted to fully understand how our WAN links interoperate. We have a head office in Canada and 5 remote offices throughout Canada and the UK/Ireland.
The head office is a 10Down/5Up Mbps wireless broadband. The other offices in Canada are 3 Mbps burstable TSL wireless broadband. The UK and Ireland offices are 3 Mbps ADSL. The remote offices have 3 computer users each. Head office has about 40.
All services are located in the head office: Email, files, ERP.
Email is done through Exchange in cached mode so that works pretty well. The ERP is done through remote desktop services, so that's okay.
File access is the real problem. My boss flipped out because of the performance in the Ireland office. He wanted to understand why it's so slow.
I'm not much of a network guy outside of the LAN so my question is: what are the factors that impact the transmission of files between the head office and a remote office. Our users work a lot with Excel files so they hit roadblocks when opening and saving files.
File access was also problematic in the other remote sites so I popped in some inexpensive NAS devices and threw all their pertinent files there and then I replicate them back to the head office at night.
Secondary questions:
What can I do to remedy the situation? Branchcache? Better connection in Ireland? Terminal server the entire desktop for the Ireland users?
Thank you all so much in advance!