Distributed team

[Christopher_Wells]

We have a distributed team, w/ various people in various countries on different continents.

The EA options to support distributed teams seem to be:
* either everyone uses a single SQL-repository-based model via the internet and VPN
* or everyone uses EAP files and replication.

I think that I prefer SQL over EAP because ...
* more reliable (doesn't need repairing)
* less effort (doesn't need replicating/merging/re-replicating)
* more interactive (change made by one person are immediately visible to other people)
... is that so?

However I fear that editing the model may be excessively slow, for people who access the shared model via VPN from a different continent (using SQL via VPN within the same city already noticeably slower than using a local EAP file).

A possibility would be to use a different SQL server for each country, or some combination of SQL servers and EAP files, however an SQL-hosted model doesn't appear to support 'replication'.

So, what is a recommended mechanism for this scenario?