1 Office, 3 PC's. Synchronisation? Need Help!

[neoglow]

Hi guys, need a little advice here...

I work in an office that has 3 PC's, all are linked together with internet through a router. Different work is carried out and saved on each machine, so for example; PC 1 is used for Accounts and PC 2 is used for Orders. Each machine is used everyday so each machine is constantly being updated with its individual use, ie; Accounting and Ordering. The problem comes when some data on each machine is out of date to the other, for example; Accounts data on the Ordering machine would be out of date to the Accounts machine. In a nutshell, we need synchronisation. At the moment, I am manually copy and pasting the up to date files across the network to the out of date machines so they become all the same. Unfortunately this is time consuming, fiddly and in the past up to date data has been overwritten by out of date data. Oops!

Anyway, as far as I know (thats why I'm asking you guys) I have a couple of options.

1. Can you use Windows XP or a program to sychronise all machines on the network at a click of a button each night before we shut them down and close? So the next morning all machines are the same.

2. Is a Server the way to go? I've built many PC's before but not a Server. My first question is Operating Systems...can you build a Server machine and install Windows XP to control the synchronising of each machine? Secondly, if XP is ok for a server machine, how do you configure programs like Excel and Word to save the data to the Server automatically and not the local machine. Is this called redirecting?

Anyway, any advice at all will be a great help, I need to gather lots of info to get this done since work are relying on me to complete this, none of the others have a clue about PC's.

Regards, Mark.

 

[Paul11]

i would say that from what you have said a server is the best way to go..

get all the pc's to save to the server, that way there is only one copy of the data and it is always up to date.

easy to set up, you can just map a network drive that so each pc saves in to a folder on the server

edit: or as clarkey says, just use one of the existing pcs as the server...

 

[Clarkey]

simple really, share a folder on one of the machines, mount the said share as a network drive on the other 2 machines, open and save files onto said drive. A dedicated server would be better, but for an operation of this scale, its really not necessary.

 

[neoglow]

So, if I was to follow this method:

share a folder on one of the machines, mount the said share as a network drive on the other 2 machines, open and save files onto said drive

How do I set this up?

Alternatively, if I did go down the Server route, is XP ok for its operating system?

Reagrds, M.

 

[Paul11]

So, if I was to follow this method:

share a folder on one of the machines, mount the said share as a network drive on the other 2 machines, open and save files onto said drive

How do I set this up?

Alternatively, if I did go down the Server route, is XP ok for its operating system?

Reagrds, M.

right click on the folder you want to share, click on "sharing and security" and share that folder.

then go to the other pcs and that folder should appear in the network connections. you can then make a link to that folder for saving files directly into it

running a server in your set up would pretty much mean just having an extra pc doing the task of storing the data, so yes, xp would be fine.

 

[JimG43]

Or Network Attached Storage. Connect the NAS to your router, then point all three machines to save the files to shared folders on the NAS. Cheaper than running a server for this scale of task.