Office Package and Web based mail servers

Jak

Hi,

Was unsure of the forum for this post - so went with the headline of computers and technology as a start. I am in the process of setting up an office with a few systems and had two questions.

The first was to look for any recommendations for sourcing and purchasing a number of office pcs, laptops, a server and printers for a small business. I have looked through Dell, Elara and Encom as the Irish options. Whilst I am not convinced that Dell represent the best value, I do like the online backup options and so on and a good warranty is important. However, I'm just wondering if anyone can think of any other good national competitors who I may not have heard of but that would deal with a business setup.

The second query is related to setting up a mail/file server for the company. Any ideas how to go about this? I presume we would need a permanently on pc in the office or is this something that we should outsource to the likes of hosting365? At the moment I relay my mail to an existing account through the website but I'm not sure this is a long term solution.

I saw this package http://www.merakmailserver.com/products/whatsnew.php
and would be keen to get something similar. I really like the idea of a web based interface for company mail when travelling. Again does anyonehave any thoughts about options/out of the box packages for such things?

Cheers,

JAK.

watty

Dell are best value for MID range priced (which is what an Office should use), but not their printers.

Get the next day onsite support.

MDaemon is good for email.

If you have no experience planning servers & networks you need to hire a specialist. Expect to pay 3 to 4 times the basic HW price of server to have an office network setup properly by an expert. Otherwise you are asking for trouble.

Online Backup is Web 2.0 pixey dust. For security do your own backups daily and store them off site.

I'd only consider a colocated or datacenter server as an office server if you have fibre with DSL or Metro backup. Hosted servers are excellent for a customer orintated webserver or ecommerce. Without fibre and alternate backup it's insantity for an office server.

I use my mail server to forward a copy of all email to an ISP's email account I don't publicize. Then I can use POP or Web anywhere in the world. Any mail software can do this. You don't want your own mail server on the web.

Consider a photocopy supplier as the printer. Most real photocopiers cost 1/10th cost of a cheap laser/multifunction/inkjet to run. (NRG/Ricoh etc). You can add a cheap brother ethernet fax/scanner/colour inkjet too.

A Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 Server is much more expensive for Software, than Linux (Fedora Core a good free choice) but needs a rarer more expensive expert to set it up. If you find a good Linux Guru, go for a Linux server, if you can't then you need a Windows Server. As a minimum 4 x disk HW Raid or it's not really a server. A single disk has two huge problems: With multi-user file access the average head seek time drops the speed from 20Mbytes sustained to 100KBytes sustained. Also if the single disk fails you have no server till it's fixed.

Nothing important will be available if the server fails.

Jak

Thanks Watty, that's some very useful advice.

I'll have another think about the mail and backup systems. There will be no ecommerce element so all we are looking for is to secure office files we work on and a number of larger data sets. I suppose the online backup is more as a means of accessing files when travelling.

As for the network - there will only be four systems on it in the office, so it won't be anything too complicated. Main objective is to share connection, printing and also to share and work on files in tandem.

Thanks again,

JAK