Picture this: you're sitting in your office, attempting to close a big deal with a potential client when the power goes out, the phone is dead and you've completely lost contact. There goes that deal, and it could have been your big break! But the reality is that you are not the only one in the building who had a potential client on the phone - everyone else in that office just lost contact as well. In that second, everyone has become disconnected with time and money lost in the balance.

Now imagine that same disconnection applied to your SharePoint content. What if you were disconnected from all of your SharePoint content, rather than a client? You are in need of a document, and you have no way of accessing it in time, or at all, to close a deal, or maybe even save lives - depending on your company's line of work.

In today's day and age, business communication is integral to the continuity of operations. The need to constantly be connected to each other, as well as to your SharePoint content becomes a very important part of the successful running of a business. However, many factors stand in the way of timely access - with geographically-separated business offices, latency and slow bandwidth can make accessing SharePoint content a nightmare. Natural or technical disasters could leave your SharePoint environments inaccessible altogether. Migration of your content when replacing older servers with newer units could be hell, especially with the prospect of losing critical data. All these factors and many more only further the reasons why Replication is business critical.

Why Replicate SharePoint is a new white paper that touches on this growing critical business need for a Replication solution. The paper details all the various factors that make the replication of content beneficial:

Benefits of Content Replication

Content replication typically offers the following benefits:

- Information is continually updated, ensuring that all users have access to the most current versions at all times

- If disaster strikes, your backup servers can be quickly brought online, with the latest content

- Servers can be replaced quickly, and the process remains transparent to users

- Strategic partners can securely access current content

- Enhanced availability of documents

- Improved productivity in remote locations

- Timely distribution of documents to remote locations

- Selective movement of information, based on business rules

This excerpt from the white paper is only a brief outline of the thoroughly-described benefits associated with the implementation of a replication solution. The paper goes on to detail various scenarios in which replication would be, and has been, vital to the continuity of operations.

The use cases range from speaking about the involvement of a replication solution in aiding all employees within a global organization to feel that they are equally important to the organization, to scenarios in which a lack of document access can mean the difference between life and death.

This last replicator scenario is particularly striking - Ship to Shore operations scenario -detailing the importance of constant access to safety documents and weather and natural disaster information. This is all safety-critical content which would be lost to a crew aboard a ship if communication with the shore was lost, a situation easily avoided with replication of all content to each ship. Less life-threatening, but equally business threatening is the potential of losing continuity of operations and critical data in the events of a natural or technical disaster. However, with the implementation of a disaster recovery solution through server-to-server replication, this potentially detrimental problem can be avoided, maintaining the continuity of operations and preventing data loss and corruption.

Employing a replication solution is evidently the only logical choice in order to avoid potential loss of critical data. However, the question now stands - what should a replication solution have? What are you looking for now that you've decided to take the next step and partake in the security that replication ensures? Why Replicate SharePoint does not leave you in the dark here either, the white paper details, very thoroughly, all the bells and whistles that a good replication solution should bring to the table.

Robust replication solutions should provide immediate, real-time transactional or event-level replication across multiple server farms. The solution should be integrated directly into Microsoft SharePoint, rather than running as an outboard application, and be able to replicate permissions, lists, configurations, web parts, version histories, alerts, features, workflows and metadata.

This is only the tip of the iceberg; the paper goes on to detail each of the above criteria, as well as many more. It contains an extensive and thorough description of everything that a replication solution should be, ensuring that you are equipped with the proper knowledge once you are prepared to choose your solution.

Read the full white paper here: Why Replicate SharePoint and stop worrying about inaccessibility to critical SharePoint data.

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