Microsoft announced yesterday through a TechNet blog entry that they have released an update to the SharePoint administration toolkit. One key piece of new functionality is a profile replication engine. In short, this new tool will enable customers with geographically distributed My Site and Shared Services farms to replicate profile data across those farms.

As readers of the SharePoint Report 2008 already know, replication is something that SharePoint does not natively support today. In fact, the issue of replicating content across SharePoint farms is something that enterprises have been requesting since SharePoint 2003. Clearly Microsoft has finally begun to address portions of the problem -- albeit for user profiles and not content. We can only hope that true content replication (and not just SQL log shipping) becomes a reality in the next release. If Microsoft wants to play in the enterprise, it will have to address truly global implementations and the fact that not everyone will have OC3-level connectivity among their different locations.