Download May 2010 - Center

Editor’s Note
Keeping Tabs on Remote Offices
Lafe Low
With the myriad challenges you face every day as an IT manager, keeping a corporate network
running that supports all sorts of remote offices has got to rank somewhere near the top. You
have all the standard challenges—providing the right applications, ensuring certain performance
and service levels, maintaining bandwidth and capacity planning, ensuring a rock-solid backup
and disaster recovery plan—and now you have to do it from miles away. And there’s often no
one at the remote office who “speaks IT.”
Reliability, capacity and security become even more important when your supporting branch
offices are spread out all over the place. Thankfully, advances in server technology and domain
controllers (DCs) make your job a little easier. Check out Paul Yu’s pair of features this month
that cover the entire process of supporting remote offices with read-only DCs. Yu takes us
through planning, deployment and configuration. He delves into Windows 7 and Windows
Server 2008 R2, and how the new RODCs can help you tie up your organization’s network no
matter how many locations you’re supporting.
Is this type of remote support something that affects your daily life as an IT manager? Are you
supporting a handful of branch offices? We’d love to hear your story. How is it working? How
did you develop your plan and deploy the technology? How do you maintain those connections?
Let us know and perhaps we’ll provide some “down in the trenches” coverage in the coming
months. Yours are the stories we want to tell.
We’re here for you. Let us know what you think. What do you want to see on the site? What do
you like about our coverage? What else would you like to see? We love feedback, so feel free to
visit our LinkedIn group, send us an e-mail at [email protected] or e-mail me directly at the
address listed below. I look forward to hearing from you.
Lafe Low is the editor in chief of TechNet Magazine. A veteran technology journalist, he’s also the
former executive editor of 1105 Media’s Redmond magazine. Contact him at
[email protected].
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