Microsoft Email

Microsoft email applications are essential for just about every business transaction: messaging, scheduling, and, in many cases, file transfer and collaboration. Users in branch offices, unaware of limited WAN bandwidth, often send large attachments to various users throughout the enterprise, even if they are in the same branch office. These emails not only take a long time to deliver, they can congest the WAN and cause other business applications to suffer.

In response to these performance problems, Microsoft has developed synchronization and optimization improvements to enhance the end-user experience and minimize bandwidth requirements. While these new features help address some of the issues introduced by latency and bandwidth limitations, users in branch offices still suffer from poor performance.

The Blue Coat Application Delivery Network (ADN) provides a comprehensive infrastructure that uses ProxySG acceleration technology to improve performance and response times, reduce and prioritize bandwidth usage and significantly reduce the time to complete email operations.

One study with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange tested email delivery over a WAN link of 1.544 Mbps (T1) with 100ms latency. The results showed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances accelerated email delivery time more than 24 times, even with a 5MB attachment sent to multiple addresses.

To learn more, read the Application Performance Brief: Microsoft Email Applications