Small business Windows support is vague terminology for umm, whatever you want it to be. This post a stepping stone to drilling down for whatever needs you have in your small business environment. We deal with plenty of businesses in San Diego that are small enough to not have a Microsoft domain environment but large enough that something like twenty machines or workstations becomes incredibly hard to manage in a Microsoft Windows workgroup environment. So we will start there.
Small business Windows support – Workgroup environment
Workgroups are decentralized. Every machine manages itself and there’s no central location to authenticate or manage your credentials with. That requires a Windows Active Directory Domain environment. That’s another post. 
Creating a new user
- Make sure you have their new machine setup for first time
- Setup their email account.
NOTE: Please make the windows user account and email the same for new employees. Ie jsmith or johnsmith. For security reason, we will call for passwords.
Example:
Exchange Email – jsmith@acme.com
Windows – Create john’s windows account called jsmith
`
It makes Synology setup a lot easier for everyone involved. We will add the same user account when setting up the Synology.
Synology NAS:
Most small businesses have some sort of small business file server for centralized file access for all their employees. In our scenario, we use a Synology NAS as that file server.
Synology – Create jsmith Synology account using the Synology DiskStation Manager. It also known as DSM. DSM provides remote access to your NAS.
Mapping drive letters in Windows is effortless from that point forward.
Mapped Drives
The drive letters vary from company to company but typically you will found an H drive as your home directory, an Admin or HR drive, a public drive for general data for collaborating across the organization, and a departmental drive for working on data within the department.
Setting up Outlook
Some environments may have file size limitations on their C drive of the desktop workstations. Others, may not know what all their hosting and client app options. Fortunately, we have a pretty extensive Outlook support blog that explains this.
Third Party Apps
Obviously, these applications vary from organization and their might not be many or none at all if your environment mainly works with an Office suite or Google Apps. Here’s a short list by industry:
Architecture or Construction
- AutoCAD
- BlueBeam
- Sketchit
- Google Earth
- ArcGIS
- Adobe Creative Suite – Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Premier Pro, and Acrobat
Engineering
- AutoCAD
- Solidworks
Legal
- Worldox
- Abacus
Medical
- Allscripts
- eClinicalworks
Financial or Wealth Management Advisors
- EZ Data
Licensing
Keeping track of all the licenses you accrue in your industry can be tricky but setting up a license manager on your server, a spreadsheet to document the licenses, and migrating to a volume license approach can make life a little better.
Backup and Imaging
Make sure you have a fail safe way of recovery from any disaster.
The post Small business Windows support appeared first on Network Antics.