Small Office - server needed? Setup?

HummuH1

HummuH1

HummuH1

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Edinburgh
Hi guys, hope you can help. I know nothing of networking and the appropriate terminology so please excuse me if I'm not quite asking the right questions!

A friend of mine is building a small office adjoing her house and will run her small buisness from there. There will also be additional rooms which may be leased out to other small buisiness's down the line.

She's wishes for 3 PC's to have access to a central drive, internet, company email (including Blackberry setup) and all having use of the various MSOffice programmes.

In addition, she's wants to able to provide an internet connection (and perhaps other services - e.g. use of server) to others if she lets out the other rooms. Maybe another six PC's max.

If possible, remote access to the central drive would be useful.

I'd be grateful if you could give me a steer on what you think the best way to set this up would be? Would a server be needed for this?

Thanks for any help.
 
depends what she wants to offer, but for her use I'd say a PC with a shared folder would work for 99% of that
 
Hosted exchange would be one easy way of sorting out the mail/push email/groupware etc, you could use a cheap NAS device with some shared folders for other bits.

If it was me though I'd buy a cheap server from the likes of HP/Dell (someone with a reasonable reputation and a decent support package) and install Microsoft SBS on it. Does everything she needs (not too sure about the push email but can't a blackberry just use IMAP or something and be told to check every 5 minutes?). She could VPN into it to get access to files away from the office too.

If she lets out other rooms to people and wants them just to share a printer and get internet access again you could do this with SBS or invest in a slightly more advanced router and just vlan off the ports that they are connected to.

Network enabled printers are also pretty cheap these days, think you can pick up a reasonable HP colour laser network enabled for under £350 now, so that would be a good way of offering shared printing resources to everyone (or just get a cheaper printer and use SBS to share it).
 
Pretty much all half decent NAS devices can share USB printers around the network anyway. Although for what you need I personally think a server would be better. Bear in mind the hefty exchange license fees etc though. Hosted exchange might work out cheaper for only a small number of accounts.
 
celliott said:
Bear in mind the hefty exchange license fees etc though. Hosted exchange might work out cheaper for only a small number of accounts.
Click to expand...

Thats kind of the point of using SBS, it is relatively inexpensive for a small deployment like this (think you get 5 or 10 client licenses in the box).
 
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