As you may know, working with tight budgets can sometimes lead to very interesting solutions. The company that I work for has over 30 retail locations and several branch offices that connect back to the corporate network using point-to-point T1 or broadband connections. The connection speed is a major concern and with the demand of data and network services increases, a need for a branch office server became apparent.

One of the options that had been considered was to use a local Windows XP workstation to be a file/print server, but the restriction of a maximum of 10 concurrent connections was a significant issue. And since the company is primarily a Microsoft shop, the option of deploying Windows Server 2008 at each location would be nice… except it meant spending a lot of money on licenses alone. Read the rest of this entry »