By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 12/19/05

This week, we’ll wrap up the best-practices guidelines on how to categorize branch offices. As I outlined last week , Nemertes has identified a five-tier structure to classify the types of locations in a typical organization.

Tiers Four and Five, discussed last week, cover telecommuters and mobile workers (Tier 5), as well as small branch offices housing two to 50 employees (Tier 4). Many of the challenges with those sites center around how to handle installations, troubleshooting and patches/updates.