Windows 7 - Folder sharing question

R

Rikki

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Hi folks,

Just a quicky about networking :)

My office (small company) has 4 or 5 notebooks all running Vista or Windows 7 in various guises of Home, Home Premium etc.

For the past while there has been a shared folder on one of the laptops where all the "stuff" is held and backed up from but now we have more staff security is an issue so we want to still have that generic "stuff" share for everyone to access holding letterheads, comp slips and open stuff but also have a folder for the business owners to view only.

Im not up on networking so thought it would be as easy as clicking on the folder thats to be shared with only specific people and select those people from a drop down - but that would be toooooo easy :)

I did a few google searches too and got myself into a right muddle talking about domains, group policies and what nots.

Can someone give me the For Dummies version on how to do this or if its indeed possible using Home based Windows systems.

Many thanks for reading this far :)

Rik
 
a domain wont work for you as the operating systems you have listed wont go to a domain. creating a share that only certain people can access would be best.
 
I'd suggest right-click folder in question, Properties, Sharing Tab....

Solderier is right, Home versions will not connect to domain controllers.
 
If you don't have a domain controller, a central server with all user accounts stored, then you need to use a workgroup which Microsoft now calls a home group. In order to have user accounts in a home group each user needs to be put into each machine in the home group. (Correction: this is sort of true, it really depends on if you want people to be able to login on every machine and/or access a secured share on every machine) This is the advantage of a domain controller for scalability and ease of account management. So in short, add each user to every machine in your office or at least to the one machine that has the folder you want to secure. Then you can see the users when you goto that folder's share properties. They must use the same username and password.

With home groups it's kind of like dummy security. The computer that has the shared folder on it asks the requesting machine for it's credentials and they happen to be identical to credentials that you've put on the shared folder computer as an allowable user.
 
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The simple truth us your organization is outgrowing peer to peer sharing and needs to look at a dedicated server as an option. Centralized backup, folder permissions, and RAID for redundancy.

Everyone starts out with simple file sharing, and the cost to go to what you need needs to be looked at. This means also having the connecting computers run Win7 Pro/Vista Pro/XP Pro. It is a shame that consumer Windows editions were used and no planning was put into place for the future.

Cheers!
 
Ditto, you can fix your folder shares to do what you want to do but it may also be time to start looking at a different setup in your office.
 
a lot of smart NAS devices out there have User Permissions, but a lot of them are equal to the cost of a weak Domain Controller.

I cheap route i've rolled out recently was a cisco E3000, and Lacie 2Big drive.

Plug the drive in via USB to the Router, and then take control of the storage through the E3000 GUI. Set folders and permission in the router, and create login scripts using those permissions for the users.

net use x: \\router-device-name\share /user:username password
 
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