Tech tip: How to accelerate SharePoint

Everyone has their favorite statistic about how long users are happy to wait for web pages to load before they begin to get frustrated, but the bottom line is that faster sites make for happier users, more productive businesses and greater revenue. Regardless of whether you are using SharePoint for internet, intranet or extranet applications, the need for speed has never been greater.

The problem is that the desire for a snappy end-user experience conflicts with the pressure to provide ever more compelling and rich content. The capabilities of current IT infrastructure combined with the laws of physics means that end users end up having to settle for either a more basic application than is really required or they have to accept that their impressive new application simply runs slowly. So, are we stuck between a rock and a hard place or is there a way to deliver world-class SharePoint applications that have performance as well as great capabilities?

At my firm Application Performance, we have been tracking the development of what has become known simply as WAX or Website Accelerator for SharePoint for the past couple of years. It has been created by the dedicated team at Aptimize in Wellington, New Zealand. When you talk to their CEO, Ed Robinson, you soon realise that although living "just North of the South Point" has many benefits, being such a long way from the US and Europe means that websites' performance, particularly of those with complex and rich content, soon becomes a big problem.

You simply can’t get away from the fact the while an average web page containing 80 different elements is loading, a user has to wait while each element is individually retrieved from halfway round the world, assembled on their PC and then finally displayed. When you are close to the datacentre and have a super-fast connection, this isn't a problem as you don’t notice all the "back and forth". But when you are any distance from your SharePoint servers or have a network that is performance-challenged in any way, you are bound to suffer.

Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator product has been created to dramatically reduce the number of times a web browser needs to connect to the SharePoint server before it can draw the page on a screen. Reducing these round trips, as well as applying many other proven techniques such as compression, increased caching and HTML-loading optimisation means that out-of-the-box SharePoint applications can be accelerated by 40-50%. More impressive still is that fact that the product can be installed on your web front-end servers in less than an hour, delivering immediate performance increases.

There is no need to worry about complex software installations or the need to negotiate to install additional hardware in your datacenter, you just benefit from reduced page load times sooner than you thought would be possible.

If you fancy taking a look at Aptimize, you will be in good company as companies like RM Education and  PZ Cussons in the UK and Ingram Micro and even Microsoft in the US already use this innovative solution to accelerate their SharePoint extranets and websites.

This video on YouTube explains what causes slow sites and how Aptimize can help. And the company's free online testing tool gives you a report on any website’s speed.

Russell Luke is managing director and co-founder of Application Performance and has worked in the application performance management area for over 12 years. You can get in touch with him at [email protected] to find out more about how to speed up SharePoint.