philodendrin
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Read/Write Access to a Shared Folder over the Web in SBS 2008
I'm supporting a company that sends employees over to China for several weeks at a time to work on various engineering projects. We have Remote Web Workplace working but are coming up with some issues due to the limitations with Internet access in China.
VPN access is typically blocked in China, so it's difficult to find a way for users to save files back to the server in the US. We looked into using Sharepoint, but really what we want to do is use the pre-existing shares on the server and not have to recreate document libraries. OWA folder access works but is read-only. Once the documents are edited it has been challenging for our remote users to save the files back especially if the user doesn't have a desktop to Remote Desktop to. A lot of them just have a notebook used for everything.
So, back in the SBS 2003 days we used to accomplish this through WebDAV and the nifty interface they had for Web folders in Internet Explorer 7. They've done away with this in SBS 2008 and IE 8.
So... I'm looking for ideas on how to give users secure read/write access to folders on the server over the Web that would be accessible via SSL, ideally. Something that uses a generic port that wouldn't get blocked. PPTP Port 1723 is universally blocked over there it seems at hotels and such.
Thanks in advance for some ideas!
VPN access is typically blocked in China, so it's difficult to find a way for users to save files back to the server in the US. We looked into using Sharepoint, but really what we want to do is use the pre-existing shares on the server and not have to recreate document libraries. OWA folder access works but is read-only. Once the documents are edited it has been challenging for our remote users to save the files back especially if the user doesn't have a desktop to Remote Desktop to. A lot of them just have a notebook used for everything.
So, back in the SBS 2003 days we used to accomplish this through WebDAV and the nifty interface they had for Web folders in Internet Explorer 7. They've done away with this in SBS 2008 and IE 8.
So... I'm looking for ideas on how to give users secure read/write access to folders on the server over the Web that would be accessible via SSL, ideally. Something that uses a generic port that wouldn't get blocked. PPTP Port 1723 is universally blocked over there it seems at hotels and such.
Thanks in advance for some ideas!
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I considered potentially publishing somethimg through Sharepoint... but... not what Sharepoint really is meant for.
I didn't know about the Storage Server 2008 Essentials release. That looks interesting. I'm scratching my head on how that would integrate into an existing SBS 2008 network... possibly on a VLAN, since the SBS 2008 box would be using some of the same ports, no?
I wound up having some success with LogMeIn Hamachi. We'll be rolling it out to some of our users travelling to China and hope it will be a viable VPN for them over there. It was incredibly easy to implement on our end.