Excel via VPN

If you have a VPN client on your system (at home?) then you ahould be able to map a drive to the system with the excel sheets on it.  Then you can simply open the mapped drive in My Computer and see the folders and spreadsheets.

Questions:

What VPN client are you using?

Do you administer the VPN?  Are CIFS/file sharing ports open?

Other very simple solution might be using terminal services if the remote pc's are 2k/xp or VNC software (I preffer VNC becouse it looks for me that its faster) to access remote machnies and work on the sheets directly on remote computer and do not download/upload documents over the network ? This solution *could* be faster the using mapped drive - but mapped drive *may* be slow only during download/upload document and vnc is not affected by this issue, from the other hand vnc might be unusable over high latency connections. The only way is to try both of methods.
VNC requires installing portion of code on the remote machine (server) and file sharing does not.

Link to VNC home page is: http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/

Hope this helps
Regards
Marcin

rrsarge

I am using Netgear ProSafe VPN Client at home and on client pc's and the ports are open.  I have the server data drive mapped and the documents are accessable.  Due to the size of the data I need to do the work on the server using a remote desktop, rather than downloading.  

I do manage the VPN.

Thanks,
Tom

Marcin

I was thinking about terminal services due to the fact that multiple users may be accessing separate (duplicate) data folders simultaneously.

Server is 2000 Small Business and all client computers are XP Pro.

I have tried VNC but it seems cumbersome.  Maybe I am doing something wrong.

I'll check out your link.

Thanks,
Tom

what was exact problem with vnc ?

Not being familiar with VNC or Terminal Services, the situations may be the same.  Mostly, it is the difficulty with screen sizes and screen refresh rates.  Also, I am not sure if multiple users can VNC simultaneously.

Jon,

For reasons such as needing to print the modified documents at the client machine, the fact that the excel documents' links are designated to a set drive letter and only one person at a time would be able to use the program on the server, has made me take another approach.  You are correct, Jon, that I may not need to use all 160MB for each user.  After trimming out the non pertinent files, I am back down to 13.5MB which by mapping the server data drive and running the programs remotely provides a reasonable transfer time.

Marcin,

Due to the current restrictions, with the drive letter mapping of the links in the Excel program, I think I would be restricted to one user mapping the server itself to the drive letter of the folder containing the linked files.  This would prevent multiple users from using the program.  I will work on that so that links will not be necessary (at some point in the future).  At that point, your suggestions, of using Terminal Server, may be the best approach.

Thank you all for your considered inputs and I will be trying to implement these changes in the next day or two.

Tom

Thanks for the pts, but what I was getting at was maybe you could avoid this whole problem by adjusting the ways in which your data was linked (maybe even a remote database server could be used) and then this whole problem might just vanish (I'm of the opinion you could continue running Excel locally, but avoid having to transfer any data other than that which you currently are modiifying).

Cheers,
-Jon