Remote offices pose tricky support problems for IT departments. Although they require the same day-to-day support services as the main office, remote office budgets often aren't large enough to hire a dedicated IT employee. In short, remote office IT support can cause pain to the corporate IT budget or require one employee in each branch office to become the local IT hero.

Furthermore, figuring out how to support numerous branch offices is enough to make many CTOs curse the day they accepted their signing bonus.

But where there's a problem, there's a buck to be made, and based on what we found in our review of the Net Integrator Mark II from Net Integration Technologies, it looks like this company's success is a sure thing.

The Mark II is a network appliance, all-in-one server that is well suited for one or hundreds of remote offices. It acts as a server for DNS (Domain Name Service), DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), Web, HTTPS (Secure HTTP), FTP, Telnet, Windows, and Macintosh files, e-mail, and VPNs. The Mark II does not do any one remarkable thing, but it does everything it is supposed to do remarkably well.

Most importantly, the Mark II does not require an on-site IT department or even one person for support, thereby saving a company a bundle in support costs and ultimately shaving thousands of dollars off the bottom-line cost of maintaining remote offices.

Also, Net Integrator Mark II shares a single Internet connection with the whole network, acts as a firewall, and handles NAT (network address translation) duties for added security. Almost every management task is handled via a Web browser. In all, we were left feeling almost obligated to give it our highest score of Excellent.

All things in