Windows Home Server - SMB Office

Curiosityx · 27 Mar 2009 at 01:27

Greetings, a friend of mine has a requirement for a server for 5 office users on a budget.

They only require file and print sharing capabilities amoungst all connected computers, email will be collected by POP on each machine, i did put forward 2008 SBS on an ML115 server but even that was a little pricy for him so i was thinking of using Windows Home Server on a HP Business PC.

Has anyone had experience of this? Im going to run it up as i have a copy as part of my action pack subscription but was interested to know whether it would be sufficient to do the job above.

Regards

iaind · 27 Mar 2009 at 07:44

If its just sharing files, there's no reason not to use XP (10 file share users max on Pro) - no point overcomplicating things.

mdjmcnally · 27 Mar 2009 at 08:24

Home Server would be perfect for what you want to do.

Whilst you can do the same with XP Pro manually, the Home Server comes with wizards for doing all of this making it easier for you.

Also the backup utility will allow you to backup the pc's to the central server automatically.

It really depends upon how much work you want to put into it yourself.

There are also the other benefits that Windows Home Server brings such as the drive pooling, remote access etc that would be able to benefit from.

Home Server doesn't really bring anything new to the table, in that you can setup manually to do pretty much everything that it gives you, can be setup with XP and other utils/apps, however it does make it simpler in that collects everything together and saves you having to manually do the work.

iaind · 27 Mar 2009 at 09:04

If it is literally just for sharing files, its probably an unecessay expense though - setting up shares in XP is about 3 clicks.

If you're planning buying the PC for the job, have you considered a NAS instead?

If they have charitable status, you can get SBS very cheaply indeed, which would be far more beneficial (Exchange etc)

Curiosityx · 27 Mar 2009 at 16:41

Thank you for the replies guys, my main interest was the remote access and backup facilities, yes XP can do a similar job but i would prefer it be fairly automated.

Ive had less stress deploying SBS, Standard and Enterprise!

iaind · 27 Mar 2009 at 17:09

Ah fair enough - you only mentioned file sharing in your original post.

I would still try to push SBS as its much more geared around this sort of thing, plus having Exchange will be a huge benefit