>>I need to develop an app that will be accessible to approx. 6 offices located across North America that are connected via WAN.
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>>The one possibility I've started to investigate is using SQLServer 7 as the backend, having SQLServer in each office and using SQLServer's Merge Replication technology to update each offices server nightly. Also, the merge replication technology in SQL 7 will work with workstations (i.e. notebooks for offline users, sales, etc).
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>>The ROI on this shouldn't be a major issue because future apps have already been identified that will have the same WAN user access requirements.
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>>Looking for opinions on this and alternatives others have implimented. I've already tried running the app over Citrix and the remote users weren't very happy with the results.
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>If the issue with Citrix was speed, there has been a hot new development in the "Third Party Products" section - a Citrix hotfix speeds up screen redraws of Fox apps 2 or more times.

The other issue with Citrix for us would be supporting over 100 people trying to access varying apps and data at the same time. To support this we would have to have either multiple servers, multi-processor servers or both. So my suggestion to our network guys has been, if you're going to have to buy the servers anyway, why not put them in the remote offices with SQL7 instead. Also, the feature of replication for offline users has them interested.