New to office networking!

[mohawk]

Hi! I have been asked to set-up a new server for our office, to be used as a file server and a printer server. we currently just have about 20 computers connected to the internet via a router, and that's is the entire network. we recently purchased a dell server, i have added it to the network by just the normal means of connecting via an Ethernet cable to the router.

what is the easiest and best way to turn this into a file server so that everyone in the office can access alter and add files to the server?

it is a windows 2003 rc2 server.

any ideas greatly appreciated.

 

[peterattheboro]

We use map drives.

Also everytime a client logs into the domain, a login script is ran which loads up all of the drives so everyone has access to them automatically.

Is the server just going to be for filehosting or are you going to run exchange aswell?

 

[mohawk]

Just File hosting at the moment, no real plans to run exchange yet.

currently to access the internet and things all a user has to do is turn there computer on, they dont need to login to a domain or anything.

 

[TheKnat]

The easiest way is to give the server a set IP address, create some network shares on it and then mount network drives on each computer as peterattheboro says. If your not interested in setting up a proper domain, go for that route. You then either need to setup user accounts for everyone, or setup the share permissions so the guest account can access it.

 

[mohawk]

thanks for the help, just got it all working, no password for the mapped drive so people can dump there files, and also got the printer server working!

so pretty happy