Achieving the best possible Microsoft 365 user experience for your business is crucial. That’s why Microsoft recommends selectively redirecting Microsoft 365 traffic directly to the closest PoP or front door of their global network and avoiding practices such as backhauling to a central proxy. Why? Office 365 traffic from Teams, Exchange, and SharePoint is very sensitive to latency that can lead to a poor user experience.

How the Network Can Help

According to Microsoft, the most significant factor that determines the quality of the Microsoft 365 end-user experience is network reliability and low latency between Microsoft 365 clients and Microsoft 365 service front doors. Users might experience Teams audio quality dropouts or disconnects, glitchy screen sharing, or slow email searches as a result of poor network quality and legacy routing architectures.

Optimizing Microsoft 365 network performance doesn’t need to be complicated if you follow a few key principles:

  • Identify Microsoft 365 network traffic
  • Allow local branch egress of trusted, latency-sensitive Microsoft 365 network traffic to the internet from each location where users connect to Microsoft 365
  • Allow trusted Microsoft 365 traffic to bypass proxies and packet-inspection devices

Citrix SD-WAN helps you easily and quickly adopt these principles so your users can realize a better user experience. As we covered in a previous blog post, Citrix SD-WAN uses the Microsoft REST APIs to instantly identify and categorize the various types of Office 365 traffic. Citrix SD-WAN is a qualified and validated Microsoft 365 networking partner.

We’ve enhanced Citrix SD-WAN to provide you with more granular classification of the Allow and Optimize Microsoft 365 categories. This enables you to implement selective bookending (one SD-WAN appliance where the user is, and one where the steering happens) to improve the performance of network-sensitive Microsoft 365 traffic. A bookended SD-WAN solution with QoS reduces VoIP dropouts and disconnects, reduces jitter, and improves media-quality Mean Opinion Scores for Microsoft Teams. You can do this by directing network-sensitive traffic to Citrix SD-WAN Cloud Direct or an SD-WAN VPX on Azure (with automated deployment).

What if Microsoft 365 is Virtualized?

Citrix SD-WAN optimizes the user experience for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops traffic as well. Citrix SD-WAN has the unique ability to peer inside its multi-stream ICA protocol. It doesn’t just see HDX traffic as a whole; it sees the individual streams of traffic (real-time, interactive, bulk, and background) and the WAN optimization feature can even see specific ICA virtual channels within the streams. This enables features such as compression of printing and file transfer traffic. Leveraging HDX traffic categorization for critical, interactive traffic, bulk and background traffic, only Citrix SD-WAN can apply granular QoS for custom prioritization of your critical traffic.

Prioritizing Virtualized Microsoft Teams

HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams gives customers a fully native, fully featured Microsoft Teams experience within Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. The Citrix Workspace app has a built-in multi-platform HDX media engine that ensures optimized device and media handling, with audio, video, and screen sharing offloaded to the user’s device.

The Citrix SD-WAN appliance where the user is identifies the Teams traffic, categorizes it, and steers it directly to the Microsoft 365 cloud, avoiding unnecessary network hops that result in latency.

Working from Home?

From an at-home Citrix SD-WAN 110 device you can connect to an SD-WAN appliance at a nearby office location that has better internet connectivity to enable QoS and superior connection resilience compared to steering the traffic directly to the nearest Microsoft 365 front door, with only minimal increase in latency. A bookended SD-WAN solution with QoS can reduce VoIP dropouts and disconnects, reduce jitter, and improve media quality Mean Opinion Scores.

In Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator, you can leverage subcategories for optimal routing of Microsoft 365 application traffic.

The Optimize category is classified into the following sub-categories:

  • Teams Realtime
  • Exchange Online
  • SharePoint Optimize

The Allow category is classified into the following sub-categories:

  • Teams TCP Fallback
  • Exchange Mail
  • SharePoint Allow
  • O365 Common

Intelligent Path Selection

For locations using Citrix SD-WAN with two ISPs, we help to make intelligent decisions for selecting the best performing ISP for Microsoft 365 traffic. This Intelligent ISP Selection is powered by Microsoft’s Beacon technology. Microsoft provides the Office 365 beacon service to measure the Office 365 reachability through the WAN links. The beacon service is a URL that is probed at regular intervals. Probing is done on each appliance for every internet-enabled WAN link.

Connections in progress will persist in the same link to maintain the session.

Citrix SD-WAN also uses the Beacon technology to measure latency for direct breakout versus backhaul of Microsoft 365 traffic. This is valuable even with a single WAN link and means your users get better Microsoft 365 performance without manual intervention by the network admin.

Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator provides admins with the ability to enable Office 365 Intelligent Path Selection. The O365 metrics report introduces the following columns:

  • Lowest Latency (ms): The lowest latency count of the WAN link for a selected time period.
  • WAN Link Selected: The number of times the WAN link was chosen for Office 365 optimization.
  • Total Decisions Taken: Total number of times a decision to choose a WAN link is taken, for the selected time interval.

Check out the eBook now for more information or request a demo.