At MindActive, we believe that you should be able to access your SharePoint site from whatever tablet, computer, phone, or other device your team uses, as long as you have some form of network connection. If you will be accessing your SharePoint from beyond the walls of your main office, here are a few tips to smooth the way.
Older file formats from older versions of Office (.doc, .xls, and .ppt, for example) take up more space for the exact same content and create issues with low-bandwidth connections. Encourage a switch to current formats for all Office documents, and you’ll save on both infrastructure space and bandwidth usage.
Office web applications display Office documents in whatever browser you prefer - a useful tool for people who don’t have latest Office version in their device. These apps download only the page, not the entire site, and will only be downloaded on demand, so they are lighter on the bandwidth than downloading and uploading complete files.
For those who access the SharePoint site from a remote pc, Connect with Office is an excellent tool. Using Microsoft Excel or Access, users can work with list data offline, cushioning the impact of a low bandwidth or intermittent Internet connection.
SharePoint also has a feature for the chronic phone users of the world: edit the url of a SharePoint page to call up the mobile site. Add /m to a SharePoint site url if the legacy Mobile Redirect feature is active, or add the ?mobile=1 query string to a SharePoint URL to load the mobile version of that page.
Microsoft has a collection of suggestions, a few of which appear above, and also has tips for other Office 365 and Office products on slow connections at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Best-practices-for-using-Office-365-on-a-slow-network-fd16c8d2-4799-4c39-8fd7-045f06640166.
