Collaboration

I am the IT Manager at a major craft brewery with over 200 employees scattered over 10 locations. Data retention and collaboration seem to be a major hurdle throughout our day-to-day operations. With a fairly limited security protocol, users have free will to create whatever they please, save the information wherever they please, and share it with whomever they see fit. Shared resources are difficult to manage and policing users doesn’t seem to be working either. Information databases as well as files pertinent to marketing such as photographs, videos, and design files are saved on an individual’s PC, rather than on the ...

I own a small IT consulting and services company, with several local, small businesses as my clients. One of them is an eight-employee branch office of a PR firm in San Francisco. Everyone at the PR firm uses laptops. These are PR folks, and they live on their computers. When they’re in the office, they’re working on the laptops. When they’re out of the office, they have the laptops with them. If you take their computer away, they’re dead in the water. So the thing I’m wrestling with is, how do I maintain their laptops if I have at most ...

One of my clients was using Microsoft terminal server and a VPN to provide remote access into a database application.  The VPN client software was difficult to use/install, and there were reliability issues related to the VPN service they subscribed to.  Complicating the issue was that the database application wasn’t really optimized for Layer 2 access over a relatively slow WAN link, so the remote office workers experienced latency when entering data into the database, and when generating reports. I need a solution that provides remote office workers a simple, reliable, secure way of connecting to server-based applications running in the ...

DirectAccess is a great technology with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, but I don’t have any servers outside my firewall.  How to route? Our network is protected by a corporate firewall. All of our machines, including servers, are located inside the firewalls. The firewall stops all access to the capabilities of DirectAccess because the machines outside the firewall, cannot access the servers inside the firewall. What ports and services do I need to forward through my firewall to make DirectAccess work for someone outside my network? Will I have to forward anything else to allow access to files hosted ...