We were delighted to host a session in December called 'SharePoint and how to accelerate performance for end users' up at the New Zealand Commission in London.

It nearly didn't go ahead because of the adverse weather in the UK - however, what should have been two sessions was quickly consolidated into one and the hardy group that did make it enjoyed a series of special presentations. Here’s a synopsis of what we covered for you ...

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Ed Robinson, CEO of Aptimize

• Ed kicked the day off speaking about the magic seven seconds, the time at which we are all supposed to lose interest in waiting for a web page to load!
• It’s interesting that just a couple of years ago, this was a 10 second wait; we must be getting more impatient! But the critical point to note is that it is reducing and expected to continue to do so.
• Hence anything that can be done to decrease page load times is becoming more and more vital to success.
• And that is where Aptimize comes in. It’s a simple-to-deploy software product that automates the industry best-practice, speed-improvement techniques on-the-fly, achieving typically 30% to 50% improvement
• However Ed left the most interesting snippet to the end; Aptimize are coming to the end of the first phase of development of Aptimize’s support for mobile devices and smartphones. Naturally those iPhone users will be the first to benefit!
• Aptimize will be able to tailor the performance enhancements specifically for each mobile device, so that a truly optimum user experience can be achieved. Aptimize for Mobile is expected early this year.

Ben Robb, SharePoint MVP and cScape CTO

• Ben Robb, industry renowned SharePoint MVP presented a fascinating insight into the factors that affect the performance of a typical SharePoint site. 
• He explained clearly and concisely what the main factors are that caused site performance to deteriorate, before highlighting many of the tricks-of-the-trade  that his team uses to address those problems.

Case Study: by Brian Gibson of RM Education

• RM Education may be known to you for the work they do in our local education department, providing hardware and services to many schools and colleges.
• They cover the full circle, through from learning technologies, through classroom resources round to assessment platforms.
• To support this they have deployed the world’s largest SharePoint deployments with nearly three million users and subsequently turned to Aptimize to boost the performance.
• After extensive testing and trials Aptimize was purchased to support this deployment, and is in the process of being implemented and rolled out.

Case Study: by Mark Cadwaladr of PZ Cussons

• Unfortunately Mark Cadwaladr could not make it down from Manchester given the weather, so Mick McGuinness stood in and gave his presentation...
• PZC are well known in the UK for their personal care products, but actually have a much bigger market in Africa for completely different products.
• To support this diversity they run a single Global SharePoint system – and given networks in Africa, performance was always a problem.
• They turned to Aptimize to assist and achieved the highlights of a 50% reduction in average page load times, and a 60% improvement in the slowest pages.
• In addition they benefitted from a reduction in network traffic of several Gb /day.

And to conclude ...

Mick wound up the session with a review of the techniques to manually improve page load times, and finally how to automate this using a product such as Aptimize.

We concluded the day with a fine buffet lunch, before retreating to the train station to work out how to get home! However, we are conscious that many of you couldn’t make the event on the day so we’d love to put this on again, perhaps in person, or via webinar – click on the links below if you would be interested.

Would you like to come to a future event on this subject?