Windows Server 2012 : Access virtually anywhere, from any device (part 6) - User-Device Affinity, Branch Office Direct Printing

Previous versions of the Windows platform have included three features for supporting roaming users, namely roaming user profiles (RUPs), Folder Redirection (FR), and Offline Files. What was missing was a way of associating each user profile with specific computers or devices. Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 now provide such functionality in the form of User-Device Affinity, which lets you map a user to a limited set of computers where RUP or FR is used. As a result, administrators can control on which computers RUPs and offline files are stored.

User-Device Affinity benefits organizations by enabling new types of scenarios. For example, you could configure the environment so the user’s data and settings can be roamed between the user’s desktop PC and his or her laptop but cannot be roamed to any other computers. That way, for example, when the user logs on to a shared computer in the public foyer of the building, there is no danger that the user’s personal or corporate data will be left behind on the computer.

BranchCache was first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 as a way of caching content from file and web servers on a WAN locally at branch offices. When another client at the branch office requests the same content, the client downloads it from the local cache instead of downloading it across the WAN. By deploying BranchCache, you can increase the network responsiveness of centralized applications that are being accessed from remote offices, with the result that branch office users have an experience similar to being directly connected to the central office.

BranchCache has been enhanced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 in a number of different ways. For example:

Branch Office Direct Printing is a new feature of Windows Server 2012 that enables print jobs from a branch office to be redirected to local printers without the requirement of first having them sent to a print server on the network. As a result, when a print job is initiated from a branch office, the printer configuration and drivers are still accessed from the print server if needed, but the print job itself is sent directly to the local printer at the branch office.

Implementing this feature has several benefits, including reducing printing time at branch offices and making more efficient use of costly WAN bandwidth. In addition, cost can be reduced because you no longer need to deploy costly WAN optimization appliances at branch offices specifically for printing purposes.

Enabling Branch Office Direct Printing

Branch Office Direct Printing is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 designed to reduce network bandwidth in printing situations when your print server is centralized or located across a WAN link. When Branch Office Direct Printing is enabled, the print traffic from the client to the printer does not need to route through the server. Instead the client gets the port and driver information from the server and then prints directly to the printer, saving the traversal of data across a wide area connection. Branch Office Direct Printing can be enabled on an individual print queue and requires no interaction from the client to use. Once a print queue is established on a client, the information is cached in the event that the centralized printer server is unavailable. This is ideal in situations where local printing must be available during a WAN outage.

To enable Branch Office Direct Printing, open the Print Management Console, select the desired printer queue that you wish to designate as a branch printer, and select Enable Branch Office Direct Printing from the Actions menu: