Well Jon,
considering the situation you described below, you should be in good shape
with the exception of using interoffice email. You did not specify what
product you are looking to use as the back end for the email (office 2000
would only be used on the front end or user side) and unless someone has a
way of doing this with some third party software running on a non-server
platform (w2k pro in your case), I will finish this under the assumption
that part cannot be done without connecting to an Internet resource.
I will just throw this out there as a suggestion but will assume for the
rest of this post that you do not wish to follow the suggestion. If you
already own NT4 Server, why not use it instead of building up a Pro
workstation to act as a server? I understand that Microsoft will tell you
that it is no longer supported, but believe me, there are plenty of places
out there that will support it because it is a very viable and stable OS.
If you are a domain (instead of a workgroup) there may be some things that
will not work with w2k pro, little things such as Netlogon for example. That
being said...
With w2k pro, you can have up to 10 connections to the computer, so with 6
or 7 you should be fine, as far as the file and printer resources. If you
are doing this for the company (meaning you do not work there and know the
systems intimately) make sure at least 5 times that they are not using any
other apps on the server -- the first few times they will tell you it is not
doing anything, but it may be running back end processes they have no idea
about. Some examples may be a back end database, an accounting or invoicing
system, etc. I have seen far too many of these types of things go south
because they did not tell the person doing the work and that person did not
hit them hard enough for all the information, you may need to watch what
they are doing for a couple days or so (or just ask them to show you what
they do on a daily basis, then what do they do monthly, quarterly, etc). I
am only trying to help here but if it is a task that they do monthly or
quarterly, that old NT4 system may be wiped clean and in parts by the time
they get around to their monthly or quarterly task that no longer works
"when I click this icon".
Please let me also preface this by saying, there are always 3rd party
utilities that can make your life easier, but they cost money and I am going
to assume you don't want to spend a lot more money on this project.
Now to the actual work,
0.. Always make sure you have a good working backup!!!
1.. I would install the printers as local resources on the Win2k Pro
machine (understand that the printer drivers for NT4 will be very different
than those of 2000, not an issue if they all have 2000 on their desktops,
but if they are upgrading from NT4 Workstation to W2k Pro, you will have to
reinstall all of the print drivers).
2.. Go around to the workstations and delete the old printer from the
users workstations and add the new printer (from the Win2k Pro machine).
3.. Go to your working backup and restore the files to the new location.
Alternatively, you can go to a command prompt *on the new machine* and use
the "xcopy" command to get your files to the new location (would look
something like this to copy over all the files on the "F drive" -- C:\xcopy
F:\*.* D:\NewShare /e -- don't neglect the spaces and ending in /e will copy
over all subfolders and their contents). Repeat this for every file store
or share.
4.. Next you will need to create a share on the new machine where you put
the files in step 3 (I would suggest using the same share name for ease of
remembering, like if it is going to map to the F: drive, call the share F.
If it is where you keep all the database files, call it db or database,
etc). Repeat this for all the shares.
5.. Next you will need to create a user account for each person or if you
really want to throw security to the wind and say "come and get us world"
set your shares permissions for "Everyone" to full permission and enable the
guest account on the Win2k Pro machine.
6.. Next I would write a batch file for the login process, not going to go
into great detail with this but the bulk of what you want to do is to have
computer connect to the shares you created above using the "net use"
commands. If you want to know more about login using back files do a google
search and take your pick.
Your essentially done, good luck and make sure that old NT 4 server stays
around for a good 6 months before deleting or disassembling -- it is for
your own good
Randy
