Pity the remote office. Long on promises and short on technology support, workers at satellite sites often don't even have an IT person to beat up on when their Citrix sessions tank. Worse, they have a serious image problem: 57% of respondents to a recent reader survey cite remote employees as the biggest threat to their organizations among all users. That's unfortunate, because the trend toward geographically dispersed workplaces is growing as gas prices edge ever higher and companies seek alternatives to maintaining expensive centralized headquarters.

On the IT side, supporting remote offices has always been a challenge, whether they house 10 users or 1,000. Every network, no matter how small, requires care in architecture, security, failover, and performance planning. One poorly designed and unmanaged remote site can bring everyone down. Case in point: In a high-tech version of Lord Of The Flies, a single site for a distributed national trade show booth manufacturer spun out of control, eventually crippling the entire network. For years the remote site, based in the Midwest, had made ad hoc changes to its network, disabling antivirus software, adding hubs and switches, and loading applications at will. Then, it complained about slow remote access to the home office and demanded more bandwidth. Somehow, this anarchy tribe managed to convince the CIO to give it a direct pipe--without additional virus protection--to help its "speed" problems.

As a result, the law-abiding central office was soon crawling with viruses and malware.

"It was the worse infestation I had seen in 20 years," says the lead engineer brought in to clean up the mess. "It cost them a fortune, yet they're still moving slowly to clean up the Midwest. They're claiming it's not them!"

And because vendors often lump satellite offices in with the remote worker craze when pitching products, CIOs can have a difficult time separating helpful technologies from the IT equivalent of the Abdominizer. When word of this article got out, we were deluged with pitches for an amazing mix of innovative offerings, bad ideas, and good old vaporware.

Needless to say, most didn't make our list of technologies that can make for more efficient remote office management. But we will discuss IP telephony, server and desktop virtualization, WAN optimization, unified threat management devices, and instant messaging from the perspective of what a main office may promise, and what a good remote IT team should point out as pitfalls. We'll also discuss two technologies, Apple Macs and Vista PCs, best left to the consumer market.

And no, leaving software as a service and cloud computing off the list isn't an oversight--we're focusing on what IT can control to ensure that business runs smoothly at all locations, no matter where your applications reside.