Stupid file sharing question

[Futher]

One of our employees is leaving the office and working at home, but she still needs access to our company's Quickbooks file. What would be the easiest way to set this up?

Is there a way to connect to a shared folder over the internet? Or map a hard drive from a remote location? I was thinking about a VPN... ideas?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

VPN would be good if they plan to work from home quite a bit. If not, port forward RDP and let them come in via that, or VNC

 

[Severian]

or give www.logmein.com a try...amazing to me that this service is still free...

 

[lardbeetle]

An easy way to set up a LAN over WAN is to use Hamachi..... you could set up a network for your company and share files over it, regardless of location or presence on the internet or local LAN.

 

[RebateMonger]

As others have noted, the two common ways of remotely accessing files are VPN and Remote Desktop (and their variants, such as Hamachi and LogMeIn.).

The "best" choice depends on your download/upload speeds, the size of the files, and the types of applications you are using.

 

[mrblotto]

There are so many possible solutions to look at.
-Is your Company Quickbooks file on a file server somewhere, or is it on an employees machine?
-Do you use static IP addresses, or DHCP? For file sharing, Static IP is the best way to go. Share the folder/file out with an ID/PWD.
-What 'speed' is your network, fast ethernet? T1? Token Ring? (God I hope not....lol)
-Will this file be continually updated, or merely accessed once in a while? Normally,only 1 person/connection can be 'editing' the file at a time. All others will merely have 'read only access' which can lead to a host of problems if someone accidentally leaves the file open.......
-Does your company have a firewall? You may have to open up some ports

 

[Futher]

Thanks for the help so far. Both locations are on Optimum Online Cable. The quickbooks file could be on a server, but at the moment it is only on a single computer. The file has to be shared by multiple people and changed continuously during the day.

I tried setting up a VPN, but it won't connect. Since the company does not have a static IP, I set up a DNS hostname and made it "company.nameserver.net". I can ping it and all, but it won't let me connect. I checked all firewall and router settings, but I don't know if I missed anything. I'm going to try some of the other options above and see how they work out. Thanks again.

 

[RebateMonger]

Remote Access gets more complicated if you can't/won't get a static IP address. In that case, your best options are probably the 3rd-party-server-based stuff like Hamachi or LogMeIn. Everybody contacts an external 3rd-party server and no unsolicited inbound connections are required.