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focusen

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Accessing Windows 2003 Small Business domain from a workgroup

Hi all,

I am going to be putting a Windows 2003 Small Business Server in a network as a domain controller and it will be running an application called Microsoft Small Business Financials.  Currently there is not domain on this network.  My question is if I put this server in as a domain controller, would it be possible for computers from the workgroup to access this server/application without any issues?  
Avatar of hack-4-good
hack-4-good

it should work fine, when the workstations attempt to access the shared resources of the server, they will be prompted for a password.

at that prompt, they should be able to type in a username and password that exists on the server, and have access akin to those credentials.

for example, from a workstation you could do this:
start > run > \\servername  [ok]
authentication:  
username =   domain-name\account-name
password =   the password for that account on the server

depending on what you connect with, you could choose to 'remember password'.

then, you have all the access you should need... map network drives... copy to and from... print... etc

or, join them to the domain to bypass the need for authentication upon access attempts
Avatar of Bradley Fox
The above suggestion will work, however, why would you want to leave your clients in a workgroup.  If you are creating an AD then you should join all of your clients to AD and give them network logons.  This will only take 2 minutes at each workstation and the users will have to be created in AD anyway.  This will save you a lot of time in the long run.
you are dealing with SBS here, the same rules dont apply, you need to get Techsoeasy's attention for this

put a pointer in SBS TA
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Jeffrey Kane - TechSoEasy
Jeffrey Kane - TechSoEasy
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