Creative Solutions Group, an advertising firm, has been charged with a huge request for proposal (RFP) due to a prospective client by the close of business. The team has dedicated hundreds of hours to complete each piece of the project, but hasn’t yet assembled the final Power Point deck. It’s 2pm, and as the Creative Director compiles each component into the presentation, she realizes that Frank’s budget spreadsheet is missing. Hours earlier, Frank frantically left the office to take care of his elderly mother. The budget, a key element to the presentation, was saved on his password-protected notebook. The notebook sits on his desk, but the files cannot be accessed by his coworkers. And when the team attempts to reach Frank, the calls keep routing to his voicemail. It’s the 11th hour and – sans a shared network – the team is left with an incomplete RFP.
How does file share impact productivity and the bottom line?
It’s scenarios like Creative Solutions’ that demonstrate how important it can be for small businesses to set up a file share.
File sharing occurs in a networked environment – either peer-to–peer, wherein files are stored and served by the users’ personal computers, or server-based, which allows all shared files to reside on a single system that can be accessed by all employees.
Employees at small businesses can be more effective if they are given constant access to the same files. Without this access, small businesses have to repeatedly email files back and forth. Not only is this method tedious, but as the files grow in number and size, this process becomes inefficient. And, with multiple people making edits to different revisions of the same document, it is easy to lose track of the most recent version.
Today, with employees commonly off-site – at the client’s office or working from home – small businesses can’t be dependent on files stored on individual staff members’ PCs. Additionally, if a computer were to face technical difficulties it would cause major issues for a team near deadline.
Creative Solutions Group, an advertising firm, has been charged with a huge request for proposal (RFP) due to a prospective client by the close of business. The team has dedicated hundreds of hours to complete each piece of the project, but hasn’t yet assembled the final Power Point deck. It’s 2pm, and as the Creative Director compiles each component into the presentation, she realizes that Frank’s budget spreadsheet is missing. Hours earlier, Frank frantically left the office to take care of his elderly mother. The budget, a key element to the presentation, was saved on his password-protected notebook. The notebook sits on his desk, but the files cannot be accessed by his coworkers. And when the team attempts to reach Frank, the calls keep routing to his voicemail. It’s the 11th hour and – sans a shared network – the team is left with an incomplete RFP.
How does file share impact productivity and the bottom line?
It’s scenarios like Creative Solutions’ that demonstrate how important it can be for small businesses to set up a file share.
File sharing occurs in a networked environment – either peer-to–peer, wherein files are stored and served by the users’ personal computers, or server-based, which allows all shared files to reside on a single system that can be accessed by all employees.
Employees at small businesses can be more effective if they are given constant access to the same files. Without this access, small businesses have to repeatedly email files back and forth. Not only is this method tedious, but as the files grow in number and size, this process becomes inefficient. And, with multiple people making edits to different revisions of the same document, it is easy to lose track of the most recent version.
Today, with employees commonly off-site – at the client’s office or working from home – small businesses can’t be dependent on files stored on individual staff members’ PCs. Additionally, if a computer were to face technical difficulties it would cause major issues for a team near deadline.
Performance is further enhanced because this system functions only to share files, freeing the employees’ PCs to perform their day-to-day responsibilities.
What does this mean to your business?
Regardless of whether you implement your file share in a peer-to-peer or server-based network, file sharing creates a streamlined process for storing and sharing information among multiple users. Whether you are a “small” small business that wants to increase productivity or a “large” small business looking for more advanced features, file share reduces duplicated work, saving employees’ time and improving productivity.
A step by step approach for file share setup in a peer-to-peer environment
If file sharing is the right solution for your business and your computer systems are not networked to each other with a server, here is a step by step process from Microsoft® to follow:
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Windows® automatically uses name as the folder as the share name (if there is not already another share with that name on the computer). You can change the share name if you want to use a different name.
File sharing in a server-based network
Implementing a file share on a server allows for easier availability of data than sharing data in a peer-to-peer network. A PC can be down, but because the data is stored on a server, other users with access can retrieve the necessary information.
Setting up a dedicated file share is as easy as adding a storage server to your business’ network. Operating systems like Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 offer an easy-to-set-up Web user interface that walks you through the process of getting the server on the network, establishing dedicated storage space for file sharing, and allowing all employees’ systems to access that space.
Once the storage server is set up, your small business can be sharing files immediately, virtually eliminating the inefficiencies associated with sharing files in a non-networked situation.