>The corporate policy has always been that if it is
>important then store it centrally.

Very good policy.  Many corporations give little thought to just how much
it is costing them to have all these independently acquired, administered,
and provisioned PCs in departments.  Far worse is what it costs the
corporation to deal with the effects of replicated, aged, and modified
business data on all those PCs...varying versions of the data upon which
the business is trying to operate and depend.  Undisciplined deployment
and operation of PCs does more harm than good to an organization because
it makes for an uncoordinated business.  Having lots of empty disk space
on PCs is almost an invitation to keep detached and uncoordinated copies of
business data on the PC.  Hence the impetus for the Network Computer model.
Central storage should be more than a policy: it should be inherently
structural, modus operandi.

Keeping the company's business data on a central server is the way to go,
letting the PCs reference it there and act upon it in a client-server
manner, using the PC power to run analyses and modeling upon it.  And a
company with 1,000 or more PCs should be performing centralized administration
else it is paying big bucks to have 1,000 or more of its employees function
as PC administrators instead of doing the productive work the company defined
their positions to do.

      Richard Sims, BU