Shortcut to a UNC path or network drive letter over WAN connection

[MattNeedsHelpPlease]

So, we have a number of remote offices that currently map a drive back to the
main office server over slower WAN links (2-3Mbit or less). It is a fact
that the CIFS protocol does not work well over a WAN connection and mapping
drives uses network overhead. So we could use a shortcut on the users
desktop to the UNC path i.e. \\servername\share.

My question is:
Is it better for network purposes to use a shortcut to a UNC path or a
mapped drive?

 

[Ken]

I find performance problems with using UNC or driving mapping over WAN and
try to avoid it. Its slow, affects the network bandwidth and high chance
copying large files could fail even at off-peak hours. The better alternative
is to use FTP or portals such as Sharepoint to share files across low
bandwidth WAN.

However I constantly get challenged by the user-community why they cannot
use shortcuts and drive mapping over WAN but I still cant find supporting
documents to prove the potential pittfalls. If anyone have any good sources
of information about this, please post it here. I will greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.
Ken