Wide Area File Services: Document Collaboration for the Distributed Business Environment

This paper outlines the essential requirements for file sharing across a wide-area network (WAN), and briefly discusses the limitations of appliance-based WAN optimization when applied specifically to document collaboration. The paper uses a solution analysis to compare common business needs to required features, and explains how appliance-based optimization falls short of these needs. The paper then describes how Globalscape's software-only solution. (WAFS) provides file replication and collaboration across globally dispersed networks, securely and reliably, with the performance of local file sharing.

Keywords: file sharing, WAN optimization, high bandwidth, low overhead, file replication, Autodesk, Revit, WAFS, file locking, version history, file integrity, network traffic, security, centralized backup, centralized management