Many smaller companies operate globally, with small offices dotted around the world. There may be a small “head office” that houses the CEO and a few key people, but with small offices of two or three people in various different cities, it can be hard to keep things centralized. Even large restaurant chains run into the same problems. Windows Server 2012 has enhanced some existing features to make life easier for these types or organizations.
BranchCache
BranchCache isn’t new. It was introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. What BranchCache provided was a way to cache content from file and web servers at a branch office, dramatically reducing traffic across the WAN, and also reducing the amount of time it took for users at branch offices to access that content/data.
In Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, the quicker/easier theme continues. Branch offices no longer require a GPO at each branch, deduplication has been introduced to reduce storage usage and bandwidth, and you can now preload content to a cache server before its requested by a user. Add it all up, and you get a useful feature that’s now easier to deploy, and works even better than it used to at reducing the cost to serve your branch office.
Branch Office Direct Printing
Branch Office Direct Printing is a new feature. It allows print jobs from your branch office to be sent directly to a local printer instead of having to be sent to a print server, first. This is a massive improvement to a problem I’ve seen for ages in centralized printing environments! Time and time again I’ve seen companies with a central print server at their head office, and people printing multi-megabyte files wait upwards of 10 minutes just to get things going.
Why? Only to see their print job finally show up at the printer 3m away from them? It makes no sense!
This will be a boon to any small business currently experiencing WAN slowdowns due to large print jobs. There are, thankfully, free (as in beer) WAN optimization virtual appliances available, but if you can reduce the need for any such solution, or put it off and focus on more important things for awhile, Branch Office Direct Printing will pay off.
That’s all the information I wanted to share today! We have one more entry left in the series, so please check back in a few days for the wrap-up!