Organizations that have implemented multiple SharePoint server farms (e.g. in Europe, North America and Asia) appreciate the way MacroView DMF allows them to ‘federate’ those separate SharePoint document stores so that their users see a single logical document store displayed in the MacroView DMF tree-view.

The federated tree-view will merge like-named nodes from multiple SharePoint document stores. E.g. all sites in ‘Clients’ site collections on server farms in Europe, North America and Asia will be listed in alpha order under a single logical site collection called ‘Clients’. Clicking on a document in any one Client site will cause documents to be retrieved from the physical server wherein that site is actually stored.

These federated tree-views in MacroView DMF can be combined with Application Accelerators (e.g. NetScalar, RiverBed, etc) so that good performance is maintained when you retrieve a document from a SharePoint server farm that is not local.

The advantage of this style of federation is that it makes it easy for a user to browse for relevant documents regardless of their physical location. For example a user in a global enterprise can easily browse documents for all clients, including those clients that are managed by local branches in other countries.

Note that this MacroView DMF tree-view federation is not the same as a Federated Search using MOSS (i.e. where multiple Search Results panes display results for a local and several remote servers). MacroView DMF achieves its federated tree-view without relying on the MOSS Search Engine. In some cases this can remove the need for indexing of documents on remote servers, which is required for a federated MOSS Search.