Steve Lane, PC PAL franchisee for Leicester South and Market Harborough writes:
"As I have been starting up my PC PAL franchise business and
finally getting to start trading over the Xmas period, I have been thinking
about IT for small business. Most
start-up companies start with one or two desktop PCs, a laptop and a
printer. After this you might have a
wireless connection to the Internet and the beginnings of a network. But there are some problems that the small
company faces:
·
How do we share information securely between
ourselves?
·
How do we share the printer?
·
How do we get access to our PCs?
·
How do we backup all of our data?
I have seen all sorts of problems when the answers to these
problems are not thought through properly.
I have seen the printer put on a central desk and a long cable being
used to plug into one PC and then the next which presents a health and safety
hazard. I have seen documents being
emailed between people in the same office which leads to problems of
duplication and both versions being changed.
To add to this there are problems in getting access to data if you are
out of the office and the data is on a PC in the office. If your hard drive fails you will end up
losing your data if it has not been backed up and the same will be true if your
laptop gets stolen.
Well, I am going to let you into a secret. Microsoft has an entry level server operating
system that solves all of the problems that small businesses have and it is
rather reasonably priced. Strangely it
is called Windows Home Server (or WHS) and Microsoft has positioned it at the
home market but it works just great for a small business with less than 10
PCs. Based on the Server 2003 operating
system, it is stable and secure. Added
to that it includes the ability to automatically backup data on all PCs, a very
easy to use tool to manage the server aimed at the non technical person and if
you have more than one hard drive in the server, it is self healing should a
hard drive fail. All of your data can be
held on the server and accessed securely from the Internet over a broadband or
mobile broadband connection. Through the
server, it is possible to remote control all of the PCs on your network as well
as managing the server from the Internet. So with a WHS in the office there is
no reason that you could not get access to a file left back at the office when
you are working at home or on the road.
Sharing a printer is made easy. Connect it to the WHS, install the drivers
and through the console you can setup the shared printer. On each of the clients you install a
connector that ensures passwords are kept in sync with the server and you can
easily connect to the shared resources.
Backing up the server
is also easy so in the event of a catastrophe that destroys the server such as
a fire, you can be assured that your data is safe. There are a couple of ways that I would
recommend you do this. If you add an
external hard drive the server can be set to automatically back up to this. If you have two hard drives and make it a
habit to change them over once per week, keeping one out of the office perhaps
at your home, then you can rest assured you always have a backup copy of your
data. There are also other online backup
services which support Windows Home Server such as Livedrive. I have also found that, although not
supported, Carbonite works just fine with WHS.
Online backup services provide automatic off site backup to servers on
the Internet. The benefit of using one
of these services as opposed to swopping external hard disks is that it is
always up to date and you cannot forget to take it off-site. The downside is that restoring lots of data
is time consuming and if the data is critical to your business, it may take too
long to get it back. So, I have gone for
a hybrid approach of using external hard drives and (just in case I forget) an
online backup service.
So how much might a WHS server cost? Well here is the good bit for a start-up with
limited budgets. It will pretty much
work on any modern PC with a large disk.
You could buy WHS and install it on the PC with the largest disks.
However I would not recommend that. An
entry level server with WHS and a reasonable amount of disk space is likely to
cost around £500 - £800 depending on the configuration you choose. Considering that this is the price of a
reasonably powerful desktop PC but specifically designed to be a server, I
think that this is really good value for money. Using WHS should make your
small business IT easy to use, increase productivity and ensure that you can
concentrate on growing your business rather than on IT headaches.
What WHS does not have is email. Hosted solutions for email
such as with Google are good value for money and work well with smart phones
such as blackberries and iPhones. If you
need an internal mail server then you will need to be thinking about small
business server. Ironically this does
not have the backup capabilities that WHS has built in, so my recommendation
would be to have both a small business server and a WHS!"
Steve Lane (PC PAL, South Leicester & Market Harborough)
