We have a corporate Intranet that our Marketing department is publishing acrobat files on. These files (books really) are very large – up to 50MBs. Hence, the end-user opens his/her browser (MS Internet Explorer) and uses http to get at these files. As you can imagine – they take a very long time to load. We believe it is the http protocal that is slowing things down – not our bandwidth – which is up to T1.
Marketing would like to continue to use Acrobat. They like the searching capabilities in the tool. We have looked at several ways of delivering this better, i.e. CD ROM, breaking up the files into smaller chunks, putting the files on a file server (as opposed to a web server) and requiring the user to download it, etc… For various reasons, these are all distasteful solutions.
Our environment is basically Microsoft-centric (Windows 95 – 2000, NT Servers, etc.).
How can we deliver these files to our users in a faster manner?
