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Remote office management

With the rapid increase in globalization, most companies have their branch offices spread across different parts of the world. Managing the computers in these branch offices is a tedious job for the system administrators. With our product in hand, managing computers in WAN across remote offices will be a much simpler process. To manage computers in a remote location, you will have to add remote offices. You can add and modify the remote offices according to your requirement. Communication across these remote offices is possible by two ways

  • Through a Distribution Server

  • Direct communication with product server

When do you use a distribution server?

A Distribution server acts as a communication layer between the remote office computers and the main product server. It replicates the software and patch binaries from the product server and gives it to the computers in that remote office. The remote office computers, instead of getting the patch and software binaries individually from the product server, gets it from the Distribution server, thus saving your WAN bandwidth. So, it is ideal to use a Distribution Server, if you have a limited WAN bandwidth. We recommend a Distribution server when you manage more than 50 computers in your remote office. 

When do you use direct communication?

When you choose your communication type as Direct communication, all the remote office computers will get the required data from the product server directly. You can use this option, if you have limited computers in your remote office, say less than 50, or if you do not have any bandwidth limitation.

Adding a remote office

For managing computers in a WAN you have to add a remote office. You can add the remote office directly by selecting the Remote offices tab and then clicking Add Remote office. The following points need to be considered before adding a remote office.

  1. As discussed above, decide on the communication type you wish to choose while adding a remote office. Either Through Distribution server or Direct communication.

  2. If you choose the communication type Through Distribution server, it is recommended to have a dedicated computer for your distribution server and this computer should have a static IP address for hassle free communication between the remote office computers and the distribution server.

  3. Select a Replication Policy that meets your needs and associate it with the remote office. This ensures bandwidth optimization while transferring large binaries from Endpoint Central server to Distribution Server. Know more on the Replication Policy and its significance here

  4. To install Distribution server and WAN agents automatically, under the Remote office agent Installation section, ensure that you specify the Domain credentials with administrator privileges to all the computers managed in the remote office.

  5. You can add the computers to be managed either directly by clicking the Add computers option, or by importing a CSV file. For adding multiple computers, the CSV file should contain computer name given in separate lines.

Click here to watch the video:

Adding Multiple Remote offices

You can also add the remote office by importing a CSV file. For adding multiple remote offices, the CSV file should contain remote office names given in separate lines.

Modifying a remote office

You can also modify the remote office, by clicking the Modify icon, under the Actions column against the remote office you want to modify. If you have modified the communication type from Direct Communication to Through Distribution server, you have to install a Distribution server to manage that remote office.

To know about installing WAN agents and Distribution server click here.

To know about managing computers of roaming users click here.

Know more on Replication Policy and its significance here

Click here to watch the video on creating a Replication Policy: