Sharing Excel Spreadsheets

[Joey Boy]

Interested to hear anyones ideas of what are the best ways to achieve this, we already share muliple .xls over the LAN, but now employees in the US and UK need access (read/write) to certain parts of them.

thanks

[francois]

Interested to hear anyones ideas of what are the best ways to achieve this, we already share muliple .xls over the LAN, but now employees in the US and UK need access (read/write) to certain parts of them.

thanks

hi'

PC Anywhere from symantec could be a solution or need to build a steady connection over the net for file sharing between the 2 locations, ask a pro to do it for you as you may need some extra firewall rules

hope it helps a bit

francois

[Joey Boy]

PC anywhere allows multiple users to connect simultaneously? It would be no good if when 1 person accessed the machine the files are on, everybody else was unable to make a connection

[Brew]

as windows user, try netmeeting

to start netmeeting with windows XP click start - run, type conf and click OK

[autonomous_unit]

Sounds to me like you want a VPN, and you are going to need someone trustworthy to set that up if you aren't already very familiar with the technology. These have gotten more affordable with small office/home office VPN appliances, but they are not trivial to setup correctly.

With a VPN or "virtual private network", you can let different sites connect securely over the Internet as if they were part of the same LAN... it is vaguely like a really long ethernet cable which of course will be just as slow and unreliable as your Internet connections. However, it should be secure enough to do the same file-sharing you do currently within the LAN.

I don't know enough about Windows to know if the file sharing services can tolerate a slow VPN connection... The alternative is to put the files in some sort of a web-based document tracking system, or even just a private FTP server, which still could be hidden behind the VPN for security purposes.

[lomatopo]

There might be some relevant information here ?

[Joey Boy]

thx for the ideas, did a bit of googling myself also and found the following peice of software..

http://www.badblue.com/

this arises a new question though, how can I keep a folder on the local machine in thailand in sync (automatically) with files on an identical folder on the webserver in the UK? (I have full route access). As theres no need for us to access these .xmls thru an internet browser.

sound advice with the VPN but its really a bit much for the moment if it can be avoided

[autonomous_unit]

The post above with just an MS URL jogged my memory... some people have spoken highly of the "sharepoint" service in the past. You might want to look into that more, for a different document handling approach that could work for both local and remote users without a full VPN?

This is way out of my league though, as I have never used an MS machine for more than MS Office or as a terminal emulator to get to a Unix machine...

[Joey Boy]

will take a look @ it, thx All