SON SON
Businesses that bigger than sidewalk lemonade stand runs on information, which makes task as varied as keeping track of accounting data and managing the flow of proposals and orders crucial, over the past 25 years, computer have completely transformed the way that small business operate, enabling the people who run these companies to organize and manage information in ways that simply weren’t possible back in the days of paper ledgers and foot long index card files.
Once your business grows larger than a single employee, however, you face a problem with managing that information, how do you maintain the data in an orderly way, and yet still make it accessible to the different people in the company who need to work with it, large companies have corporate IT department to do the heavy lifting of designing and maintain complex computer networks, but most small business are hard pressed to get all their work done on time without attempting to care for complicate computer systems.
Dedicated server
Fortunately, computer networks have became much easier to install and use in recent years than they in the more distant past, your don’t need a dedicated server and many companies find that a local network can be worth the investment if only to share resources such as an internet connection or fast printer, it easier than ever to share data on a network as well, the simplest way for your to share data is to allow other computers on your network to see a portion of your system’s hard drive, but unfortunately the data is accessible to other only when your computer is running, setting up a separate storage system that anyone can access any time will help you get around that problem, such products, which are known as network attached storage (NAS) device, make an affordable and sophisticated option for small businesses also very handy at home, where they can make digital media such as MP3 audio files available to all of the system linked on a home network.
NAS Device
As its name implies, NAS device attaches directly to your network use an Ethernet cable to plug in to any switch or router and then plug the power cable into an outlet, if the device will be a mission critical component of your network, consider getting standby power supply for it, when you turn the NAS device on, it will boot up, communicate with your network and obtain a network address, at that point, it’s ready to go.
Configuring the device is generally pretty easy, if you decide to change a default setting, such as the one defining groups or the one limiting access to certain folder, the device’s utilities will step your through the process, in almost every case, the device’s controller will contain a web page that you can access through any browser, type the IP address for this page into your browser and you’ll see a log-in screen requesting a name and password, from there, you can set up users and groups, back up settings and enable features such as web access.
For easiest access, you’ll want the device to treat your computer as though it were another local hard drive, here’s how to do it in windows XP, open Windows Explorer, and select Tools – Map Network Drive, the map network drive window lets you specify the drive letter to use for the new drive, you can use any letter not assigned to your PC already, we chose to call our unit drive Y, but we might just as well have selected drive N for “ Network”.
Next click the browser button to find the NAS device on your network, the “Browser for folder” windows les you find devices on your windows network, and then connect them to the shared folder on the NAS device, after you’ve selected the folder, click Ok to return to the Map Network drive window, at the bottom of that window you’ll see a check box labeled “Reconnect at logon”, if you put a check mark here, your computer will automatically reconnect to the NAS device whenever it boots up, so you’ll never have to run through these steps again.
Configuring NAS in vista
The steps for vista are nearly identical to those for XP, in windows explorer’s folders pane, select Computer and then click the Map Network Drive option at the top of the window, the map network drive dialog box has the same options in Vista as in XP and the browser for folder feature works the same way as in XP as well, to connect to the NAS device is easy, you don’t need to know any fancy network stuff or anything about IP Addresses or file system and you’re done, the NAS device will show up as another hard drive on your computer, hope this introduction is inviting enough that you will want to make the plunge and install a NAS device on your network.