I had a series of interesting conversations over the last few days with a storage server colleague about hosted file shares. He and his team hypothesized that a hosted share service would “cannibalize” our hosted SharePoint offering. Here’s my response to his notion that file shares and SharePoint compete against each other:

“It’s not about how SharePoint and File Shares compete, but about how SharePoint is not the right mechanism for certain scenarios and file shares fill that gap. File Shares are all about storing data, but SharePoint is all about connecting people to information. SharePoint is not the replacement for file shares. SharePoint is the UI that makes data accessible and useful no matter where it’s stored.  In the future, SharePoint will store some amount of data, maybe all of it on file shares, but in the end SharePoint is not concerned with how data is stored. Rather, it exposes data to users in logical ways and helps those users interpret data to formulate information.”

So what are the scenarios where file shares make more sense than SharePoint as a storage technology, you ask? There are really only a few I can think of:

• Databases and concurrently accessed application files – I’m not sure why you would store databases or application files on SharePoint. They have no collaborative value and any application using these files would likely connect to these files using a LAN protocol and not http.
• Backups and dumps – Again, these have no collaborative value. I guess it’s possible that you may want a list of these files. In that case, you could store these files on a file share and use one of the share view web parts or build an application that indexes the share and stores the metadata in a list.
• Files larger than 100MB – While it’s possible to store large files on SharePoint, I think File Shares are better at it. Often bandwidth constraints prevent users from completing uploads and downloads of really large files over the net. Again, you can store large files on shares and link to these files using SharePoint.
• Large sets of files – The scenario here is that you want to store lots of related files in the same SharePoint folder. For example, maybe your organization creates an hourly report and wants to store many years worth of these reports in the same SharePoint folder. If they absolutely refused to organize this data in a hierarchal fashion, it would be best to store this data on a file share. While technically you could store this data on SharePoint, best practice suggests that you should limit any single folder to less than 2000 items. This is because management of large lists can become cumbersome and upgrades can be a challenge. Not that large file shares perform much better IMHO J