SteelheadDan

Hi, Thank you for your prompt reply! The equipment we have, is basic home/office computers. -We have 2 desktops (an AMD quad, and AMD dual core) -2 Acer laptops (these are what the field teams have) -1 Dell laptop. -All computers are less than 2 years old and are running various versions of Windows 7. -For Backup, I have a 1 TB USB external HD that automatically backs up the main desktop computer once a week. -All computers, when at the office are networked on the same workgroup with basic printer and file sharing. -We have a basic home-grade Belkin wireless router, and a better than basic cable internet connection. Just basic home/office equiptment! That's why I wanted advice, it seems like we are going to have to purchase additional hardware, and I just want to make the right decision and not spend too much for something we won't utilize to it's full potential (i.e builing a computer, then spending $700 on server software). I really like the idea of the NAS. Per your suggestion, I'm looking into making sure one can be accessed simultaneously by multiple users. Can you verify that this is possible? The Sharepoint and SkyDrive seem OK, but I would rather not have to make everyone "upload" every document, all the time. An example of why I would not want this, is if one of the teams comes back from a job, it could be easier for them to transfer 60+ job-site pictures locally to our "storage location", than to have them wait for that many pictures to upload to a cloud like environment. I don't really have that much experience with cloud environments. So if someone would like to chime in on there pros/cons I would appreciate it. Thanks for all the help! I really appreciate everyone spending time to answer my questions. Additional comments are welcome and will be much appreciated... (Edit: I just completed my research on NAS systems. It seems like they are very slow to access and download stored files. Could someone explain the steps or point me in the direction to setting up a server running server 2008? Would the best route be to have people remote into the computer, or is there a way to set it up to where they just see the server hard-drive remotely if the click on the "computer" icon. I have used both of these methods, but I have no clue how the later was implemented...)

Hi :turned: This is my first post. Thanks for having me as part of this community and for all the help! I'd like to pose my problem and ask for some advice on how to proceed: I work for a small company, that has 2 teams of construction technicians. I do most of the IT for our company. I'm very good with basic networking, computer reformatting, building computers, and general day to day IT issues that we encounter. Basically, my company would like to set up a server, so that our 2 field teams and some of the bosses can share pictures, spreadsheets, and collaborate on field reports. This seems very basic but I don't know how to implement these objectives. When I was in College, we had a personal drive that I could access from my home. The way I gained access, was to vpn into the server and then I could access the drive from "My computer". Here are my questions: -How could I implement this? How do I set up a VPN? Do I need to set up a VPN? I basically need a shared hard drive to show up on my tech's labtops in their "my computer", when the teams are out of town. That way they can take pictures of the site, and upload them to some sort of centralized location? -Do I need a server to do this? I was looking at building a server and then getting Server 2008. Server 2008 is expensive! I just need to know how to implement a shared hard drive and if you need $700 worth of software to do it :D At another job, I used to use Server 2003 to remote desktop into the server to use Peachtree to add invoices. I guess I could do that for our field techs too, but I'm not sure that is necessary. Once again, all we need is to just share a hard drive that is accessible to our people outside of our office network. Thanks for the help! I'm sure this is a basic questions, but I appreciate any and all comments or feedback. Best, Daniel