Work Proposal Ideas Needed...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Laura Alexander
  • Start date Start date
L

Laura Alexander

We are looking to evolve our small business network from
its current peer-to-peer state to a Windows Domain managed
network, with MS Exchange and Outlook for groupware. We
currently have five machines on the network; we expect
this to grow to ten machines in the next month. I could
some ideas on how to move forward with this.

Thanks...
 
You could have a look at Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 (2003 is about
to come out). It has W2K-server, ISA 2000-server, Exchange 2000-Server and
SQL 2000-server with it, as well as Outlook 2002 for the clients.

Marina
 
Some easy ones...

1. Save your money by getting the 10 email boxes to your ISP for the time
being. The charge is very small, and you will initially have LESS headaches.
Exchange is a COW, heavy, overweight, and if you're starting out, let it go
until your company is a bit bigger to have your own email server. You need a
great deal of hardware grunt to move that application too. Outlook can look
for mail by itself.

2. Ideally you could use two servers, one to act as an application server
for remote users outside your office and look after your logins, the other
as your file Server as a child domain. If you need to, you can add more
child domains as the company grows. Select Server PC's based on that
performance, for example the File Server can be low spec speed (2GHz, 512MB
RAM), and provides a bit of redundancy if one server is out of action.
Putting eggs in one basket scenario.

3. Have a good backup scheme going, it's expensive but Drive Image is great
to regularly backup your Server configs and LAN PC's.Portable hard drives
are the way to go these days, so if the place catches fire, you have your
data off site, safe.

4. Anti virus Servers are a must, these can go on the Servers as well.
 
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