Hi Everyone,
I am a one-man IT department for a small door manufacturing company in the U.S. I am looking at opening a 4 person marketing department offsite and am looking for recommendations for connecting it to the main location's network. I was thinking of moving the large amount of photos and video files to the new location, but we would need to be able to check our email from the exchange server and be able to access the SQL Server 2008 database from our Access front-end database. I've heard that VPN's are really slow. What is the best approach for this situation?
Main Location: We have a Small Business Server 2008 network at the main location with about 15 users. There are two servers at the main location: One SBS 2008 server and one Windows Server 2008 machine with Sql Server 2008 on it.
New location: Since it will only be 4 people in the marketing department, I thought I may be able to get away with a NAS device with all the photos/videos/etc on it, without needing a server (however, if necessary, I do have a spare SBS 2003 server I could implement but it seems overkill for 4 people.). I'm assuming it would be pretty simple to connect Outlook to our main location's exchange server, since we have our iPhone email connecting to the exchange server just fine from away from the office. But we would still need to be able to access the sql server database at the main location somehow. Perhaps a VPN would be sufficient for a database connection? I will probably have a Comcast Business connection of about 30 Mbs down, 6 Mbs up. I've never used a VPN, so I'm not sure how well they work.
Any guidance here would be much appreciated! I am a one-man IT department. :)
-Scott
