Does your business have a server? You might think that your business is too small for a server… you might have just started a business or there could be a few of you and you will most likely feel you can get by with sharing files using email, USB drives and through other means.

Every company no matter how big or small needs a server. Having a server in place while your business is in its early stages will ensure you are ready for growth.

A server is an important part of a network that performs a number of critical functions which can include:

- Control who has access to network data through user names.

- Provide shared access to files

- Provide central email and collaboration management

If you are not using a server, it is very difficult to share files throughout your company and manage who has access to those files. For example, a server OS —such as Microsoft Small Business Server — enables you to designate roles to your 50 employees. Five employees could be in accounting, 10 in sales, five in support and so on. If you designate everyone in sales to have access to the customer-sales-report-2008.xls file, staff in support would not have access to that file.

There are more than likely a lot of files that you don’t want all of your staff to have access to. With a server, you can determine who has access to what, you can restrict access to users or different departments – the options with a server are endless. The server enables you to limit access through assigning user names and passwords to specific files or even entire folders.

In regards to file sharing, the server is the central “filing cabinet” of your company’s information. If individual users save files to their computer hard disks, the files are not reliably or easily accessible to others. With a server-based network, if the local computer is turned off, you can still access the files. Storing files on the shared server ensures that they are more secure and accessible to all authorised users at any time.

Since your server is such an integral part of your network, it’s important to work with an expert to ensure that it is maintained. In the same way that you regularly maintain your car, your server needs regular maintenance too. As part of your server support, the SmarterWays technicians take care of the server efficiency as well as looking at security, back-up, applications and much more.

The SmarterWays technicians will make sure you always have enough hard disk space and enough memory access to make sure the response time of your server does not become slow and unstable.

Email is probably one of the most often-used applications for businesses and your server can be used to manage your company’s email system. Depending on the email program you use, for example Microsoft Exchange, you not only have email, but also advanced collaboration features.

Working closely with Dell and Microsoft, we only provide the best and most up-to-date solutions to our customers so we are now dealing with Windows SBS 2011 – offering the most current solutions possible.

If you don’t have a server, please get in touch with our SmarterWays team. We will be able to give you a technology audit to guide you into the type of server you need, how best to configure your network, and they can review your entire technology needs and help you create a technology plan for what are the best solutions for your business.

Thank you

SmarterWays