I have a small office I run. We need calendaring, e-mail and document sharing. Formerly, we used SBS 2003 and Outlook. We are moving to Google Premier apps for e-mail, calendaring and tasks, and have a premium Dropbox account for sharing Word and Excel files. That part of things works great.
We use a billing program called Timeslips 2008, and have five user licenses. In order to use Timeslips over a network so that everone has access to the same date (but with their own log-in), the data files must be installed to a shared folder. Then, every client shares that folder and maps it as the same drive letter (so everyone must map it as "T:\" for example).
Right now it's installed on the SBS 2003 server, but what we'd like to do is install it on any old computer and save the data to a folder that can be shared from anywhere. What I mean is we'd like to have the data stored online such that the client computers map that online location as the "T:\" drive, and have it accessible from anywhere. That way we can enter billing from our laptops from anywhere so long as we have internet access.
I looked online for a service that allows this but I couldn't find one, or I just don't understand the process very well. Apparently AOL's X-Drive used to permit this (albeit very poorly according to some comments) but it has closed. I tested the process using Dropbox and it worked for a few minutes, but then the way Dropbox manages conflicts when the data file is opened by more than one user caused a problem. It was lightening fast when it worked, by the way - much faster than the current implementation using SBS 2003.
We are not technically inclined, and we're just looking for a simple way to make this work. Honestly, we only barely got SBS 2003 working and even then it took us an entire weekend. We just don't have the skill or smarts to set it up to do everything we need and we have problems with it every day that I am sure are related to our inabillity to set it up properly. And we aren't big enough to afford to hire an IT guy to set it up correctly - the quote we received was $10,000 and that's just too much for what we need. Any help would be much appreciated.
-Dacker
We use a billing program called Timeslips 2008, and have five user licenses. In order to use Timeslips over a network so that everone has access to the same date (but with their own log-in), the data files must be installed to a shared folder. Then, every client shares that folder and maps it as the same drive letter (so everyone must map it as "T:\" for example).
Right now it's installed on the SBS 2003 server, but what we'd like to do is install it on any old computer and save the data to a folder that can be shared from anywhere. What I mean is we'd like to have the data stored online such that the client computers map that online location as the "T:\" drive, and have it accessible from anywhere. That way we can enter billing from our laptops from anywhere so long as we have internet access.
I looked online for a service that allows this but I couldn't find one, or I just don't understand the process very well. Apparently AOL's X-Drive used to permit this (albeit very poorly according to some comments) but it has closed. I tested the process using Dropbox and it worked for a few minutes, but then the way Dropbox manages conflicts when the data file is opened by more than one user caused a problem. It was lightening fast when it worked, by the way - much faster than the current implementation using SBS 2003.
We are not technically inclined, and we're just looking for a simple way to make this work. Honestly, we only barely got SBS 2003 working and even then it took us an entire weekend. We just don't have the skill or smarts to set it up to do everything we need and we have problems with it every day that I am sure are related to our inabillity to set it up properly. And we aren't big enough to afford to hire an IT guy to set it up correctly - the quote we received was $10,000 and that's just too much for what we need. Any help would be much appreciated.
-Dacker
