Setting up my own home office 'corporate' computing environment

Factual Questions
1

I use MS Office for pretty much everything since, A) MS Office is ubiquitous across the corporate landscape for computing, and B) my employers’ have had licenses, that it’s just what I learned. This OP is more geared towards Outlook, for it’s email and calendar functions. . . so here goes.

Suppose I wanted to start my own small business, ‘TripCo’, a mom-and-pop business that specializes in paper products and beet farm produce in Northern New Mexico. I don’t want cloud-based service, because everything out towards the beet farm is dial-up service. However, I want to have a stand-alone “server” and “network” for TripCo for the email and calendar functions (along with the rest of the MS Office suite).

What are the minimum hardware/software things I would need to get, in order to have a functioning paper/beet business, running out of the kitchen on a desktop computer, where Santa Fe.Espanola/Tierra Amarilla customers can email ream/bushel requests to “Tripler@tripco.com” and I can schedule deliveries in Outlook?

I don’t need a web presence. Locals already know how awesome my beets and paper are by word-of-mouth. The web presence will come when I expand the business into Southern Colorado. Do I need a desktop computer, or a full-blown server? I assume there are ‘small business’ licenses from MS for Office.

Tripler
Bottom line assumption: I have electricity and indoor plumbing at TripCo HQ.

2

You don’t want to run your own server, for sure. It sounds like you need two things: A laptop/desktop to access and answer email (with some version of MS Office on it), and a webhost to provide a domain name (tripco.com) and email hosting.

I don’t know the best option for hosting these days.

3

Yeah, the last thing you want to do is get involved with hosting and managing your own server. There is a whole business out there where companies provide exactly what you need, manage it and provide all the needed resilience and maintenance. Providing a MS based system is the most popular.
Most importantly, they will be hosting it in a proper data centre. Your outward facing business is hosted by them. Most will host a basic web presence for you as part of the deal. You connect as you need to to get emails etc, and can live on the end of a dial up line.

Yes, there is a small business/home license for MS Office. But nowadays you just get an Office 365 subscription. Some providers of the above services based on MS will set you up with the whole shebang. It isn’t expensive. Maybe of the order of $20 a month for basic hosted services plus Office 365.

4

I may be wildly out of touch but are there still places in America where dial-up internet is literally the only option? Surely even satellite internet would be available everywhere, and then something like Google G Suite is possible as an alternative to Microsoft Office. And there are also free options like LibreOffice.

5

For hardware all you really need is a Raspberry Pi and a usb hard drive. Use postfix for a mail server, samba for file service, and apache/mysql/php for a web server.

Of course you also need a bright high school student with an ability to “read the faq” to set it up and maintain it for you. The high school student will need good internet access to download the software and get access to the on-line documentation while setting it up, but once he’s done that he can bring it out to the beet farm and set it up on a shelf somewhere and plug it into your local network. Your beet farm does have a LAN right?

Since you only have dial up at the beet farm, it doesn’t have to be connected to the internet, it could be entirely self contained, with the bright high school student coming out with a flash drive to do periodic maintenance.

You could pay him in beets, I’m sure he’d love them.

6

OK, say you do that. What happens when the bright high school student who set this up goes off to college or on vacation someplace and something stops working. Who is your backup? Does anyone understand how it’s all setup and what the various passwords are?

7

How you gonna keep them down on the farm …

A mere detail. Make sure you know the root password (not really required. It’s really easy to hack into a computer if you have physical access to it) and find a new bright high school student. There’s always an up-and-comer.

8

I think there might be a misunderstanding here of how cloud services work? You can’t have email without it being cloud-based, because the whole point of email is that it lets people from anywhere send another person email via the internet. The “cloud” is just another term for “on the internet”; email that’s NOT on the internet is worthless. What you’re describing might be suitable for some sort of intra-company messaging system, but not for a customer-facing email service.

While hypothetically you could run your own internet-facing email server from your rural barn, you will run into many, many issues maintaining it, ensuring that emails are received (and your responses are delivered). That’s not your fault, no matter what you do… it’s more that decades of spam have required the creation of many email-specific security policies that the big email providers teamed up to create, for the explicit reason of making it harder for fly-by-night spammers on random email servers to deliver mail to their customers. This means that to Gmail, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc., your homebrewed email server appears just like another spammer, and will be categorized as such, unless you configure everything correctly and stay on top of all the latest security developments every few weeks. That’s assuming you can even keep it online consistently from your rural location; if you can’t, other email servers will error out when they try to reach your server, and tell their users that they’re having trouble. And your customers would probably just move on to the beet farm the next town over.

So going with a standard email provider not only means it’ll be far cheaper (in time, if not money) than rolling your own, it’ll also ensure your customers will be able to send you messages while you’re asleep at the barn.

You think you want self-hosted email, but I think what would work better for you is actually just standard email that works while you’re offline, where you can read and reply to downloaded messages while offline (downloaded the last time you were connected), save your replies, and then send them all at once when you do connect to the internet – whether through dial-up or when you’re in town once a week for the market or whatnot. Fortunately, because of the way email evolved (from the pre-dialup days), this is actually the default behavior for most email programs, from the one on your phone to Microsoft Outlook to even Gmail (with offline mode enabled). Even Microsoft Office, the “cloud” version (Office 365) actually downloads the programs to your computer, only requiring an internet connection for a license check once a month. Dial-up is more than adequate for that.

In other words, all you need is a bog-standard PC, Mac, Chromebook, or phone. Email will work fine by dial-up, especially if you turn off image auto-loading. What will likely slow you down is all the app and operating system updates that will inevitably come, and for that you might just want to hop into town once a week where you can get fast internet, and/or explore satellite/cellular/Starlink/WiMax/rural internet from where you are.

For your (minimal) purposes, a 10-year-old laptop or a smartwatch would have more than the computing resources you need. The processor speed is not your constraint here, technical expertise and stable internet connectivity is. Seriously, there is no reason (given what you’ve stated) to run your own servers… it would be all pain and zero gain.

If you were talking in hypotheticals and there is actually some other reason to run your own business intranet and small biz servers, can you be more specific?

9

I understand how these things work. My understanding of the OP was that he wanted to duplicate the cloud services of a corporate environment in a LAN that is not connected to the internet. That is quite possible, and it can be fun to learn how it all works by putting it together in a safe fire walled environment.

Running your own internet facing mail server is a lot of work, and is worth paying someone else to do, but that is not what I understood the OP to want.

10

I didn’t mean to reply to your post, but rather to the OP. Sorry, did I maybe click the wrong button? Still getting used to this forum software.

This is the part that made me think the OP wanted an internet-facing email server (emphasis added):

It wasn’t clear to me whether The Beet Farm had more than one employee who needed to communicate with each other, instead of with customers.

If what the OP wants is intranet messaging, something like Skype for Business Server would allow that, but it is NOT trivial to run and maintain a LAN intranet plus a Microsoft home office/small biz network.

11

OK, lets start from the beginning.

Email: You do NOT want your own server. No. Nyet. Nein. De nada. As others mentioned, email configuration, server configuration, dealing with spam, etc. Several companies, from Microsoft and Google to (perhaps) your own phone company or cable company offer domain-personalized email as an option. This is as simple as it gets. If you use MS Office Outlook online service, you can also use calendar functions.

However, you then also have to purchase the domain name. IIRC tripco is a UPS manufacturer. You need to pick a name that is not too long, silly, or specific. (I.e. what if you branch into other produce? TripCoBeets would not be good) Also be wary of something that matches a different domain. If yo are a .us or .info and there’s a .com out there with the same name, people will get confused. Also, you have to renew this domain registration every 2 years or so.

Unless you have a large number of users (Microsoft suggests about 10) you don’t want a server and domain. The management hassles are too much unless you are a deep-dive computer nerd. Use workgroups. If you want a central file repository for 2 or 3 PC’s, get a network-attached hard drive. This allows every PC to map to the same file share (“SMB file share” as your M: drive, perhaps) possibly password protected. If you share from one computer instead, that computer has to be always on when other computers need access.

If a computer file collection is your whole business, BACKUP! Then backup again. First of all, hard drives do fail Power surges happen. Glitches during write happen which ruin files. Everything will be fine until it’s not. The other thing is the most common hack - ransomware. You click on some crap in email, and it runs a program which begins re-writing every file so it is encrypted, then they ask for money (bitcoin) to decrypt it all. Note at this point, if you backup was also attached to the computer and writeable, well… hope you know where to buy bitcoin. backup and detach the backup regularly.

If you need remote access to certain files, use a service like Dropbox - or Microsoft’s OnedDrive. (Comes with Office I think) Allows your laptop to access files stored in there from anywhere. A lot less hassle than setting up full remote access from your laptop to your office network services.

The only gotcha is whether MS Office and Outlook will tolerate dial-up services. IIRC Outlook will compare “when is the last time I updated?” with the central Microsoft Outlook server, and only update new items. I think there’s an Outlook setting to allow cache mode (copy of emails etc. locally) and to only download headers, not the email body, until you request if your email is too large. Ditto for files if you use OneDrive, keep an eye on how large your files are. text is usually small, but pictures are huge and video is pretty much impossible on dialup.

12

I think that md-2000 pretty much has this covered. The only other things that weren’t mentioned were the cost of the Windows Server and Exchange Server licenses, and the cost of the server you will actually be installing them on. Unless you have the expertise to configure and maintain these servers, you’ll probably need to bring in some outside help to assist you from time to time.

Sooo not worth it…

13

All bolding by Tripler is read and understood–loud and clear! Thank you!

What got me on the “server” kick, was A) email services, but also B) the understanding that for a ‘business license’ for MS Office required the suite to be installed on a network. Being that paper craftin’ and beet growin’ operations are 24/7, but our connectivity isn’t necessarily required to be so, I imagined that a little, local server would allow a terminal in the Barn, in the Shed, and in the Kitchen for all of us to keep simultaneously working on a ‘local cloud’ while under the self-imposed limitations of dial-up connectivity.

Good point. I had expected there to be a financial cost to this, but I reckoned the technological cost would be something I could adapt to and overcome with a little hardware investment and some training.

We here at TripCoReamsAndBeets.com are a small, humble company, in the foothills of the Jemez Mountains; our connectivity is even humbler. This is one of those locations where dial-up is the only option due to topography. We’re in the shadow of larger institutions, however, there is not much scientific research that can be done on beet growth. We could happily offer you products to help you write about it though!

We don’t need instant, intranet messaging, when Bill, Zeke, Mose, and Joe-Bob carry FRS radios, and normally just holler at each other across the fields. We just need communication with our paper and produce customers.

Tripler
CEO, owner, and proprietor of TripCoReamsAndBeets.com. A small, humble company.

14

Let me make sure I’m understanding this right. Is this correct?

  • You have 4-5 employees working at TripCo
  • Each TripCo employee has their own computer, and each computer needs its own copy of MS Office, and the ability to email customers
  • There are one or more dial-up lines at TripCo. They’re slow but available any time you need them
  • TripCo employees won’t need to work collaboratively on the local network, without an Internet connection

If that’s correct, then you don’t have to overthink this with a server or network. You just need either 5 copies of Office 2019 ($249/copy) or 5 subscriptions to Office 365 ($8.25/user/mo, or $12.50 including Microsoft-hosted @tripco.com email).

Either version would work offline, as they both install the desktop Office apps, as long as the computers can go online at least once a month for a license check. Office 365 comes with Outlook, but Windows 10 has a free “Mail and Calendar” app that might be enough for that.

There is no need to host a server of your own, of any sort.

That last bullet point, though, is the only potentially tricky part. If you actually need your employees to be able to work with each other over a local network, while not connected to the internet – kinda like Google Docs but only over the LAN – then that actually becomes a lot trickier. if that’s the case, can you describe what the employees would need to do with each other?

16

First three are true, but the fourth is not; workers will need access to a shared drive, to open invoices, read data, add data, update customer info, analyze marketing data, and save/print invoices and shipping labels for reams and bushels.

In an example, that shared drive does not need to be updated from the bigger Internet. Joe-Bob in Customer Service can populate an order form/invoice by manually typing in data from the shed, while Mose can pick the beets and grab two reams of paper, and update the invoice again from the barn. Zeke would fill the box in the barn, and manually update the data in the file on the shared drive with the drop off date to the post office.

The invoice resides in a “shared drive,”* while Joe-Bob, Mose, and Zeke update the file, all without an outside internet connection. All we’ve got is a within-the-farm intranet. *Note: this probably isn’t the technically accurate term, but it’s what I’ve heard it called at my various jobs for nigh on 20 years.

Which leads me to my follow-up questions:

  • Is there a difference between setting up a LAN, and having a server? Doesn’t a LAN need a server? (I had always assumed it does, which put me down the track of needing my own server in the barn).
  • Given the between-the-farm connectivity, I think the LAN is what I would need, right?
  • Just how hard is a LAN to set up?

Tripler
I suspect a LAN is a li’l more difficult than just plugging in Cat 5 cable between computers. . .

17

Let me think about this a little bit. One question for you is, how do the employees currently work together on shared documents? Or if this is just a hypothetical, how would you want them to? What happens when Mose and Zeke both open the shared file and edit it, without realizing the other person is doing the same thing? How would you like to prevent and/or reconcile such edit conflicts?

Normally Google Docs/Sheets, or their Microsoft Office Online equivalent, is a good solution to that because everyone is working on the same document in the cloud. But you specifically you said you don’t want that, right, even if it works over dialup? In that case, are you willing to live with confusing document edit conflicts and versioning issues?

(not ignoring your other questions, just thinking it through)

18

A LAN is just a network of computers in a local area, as in an office or school, as opposed to the big ol’ internet.

A server is a role that a computer plays. Any ol’ off-the-shelf PC can act as a server, or if you’re a big enough company, you can get specialized computers that are made for serving a lot of users, which usually means they are more powerful, have higher-quality components that are more stable and can be easily replaced, have different power and cooling requirements, etc. But for a small home office, any regular computer will have the horsepower to act as a basic file server and such.

You’re generally right that you’ll need a LAN (and “intranet” is totally fine… it just means an internal company network not accessible to the public). But this actually COULD be as simple just setting up a wifi network around the farm (or a wifi mesh, if the acreage is big enough) and adding a networked drive somewhere in there. Some wifi routers allow you to just plug in any USB hard drive. Otherwise, you can get something called a “network attached storage” drive, which is basically a hard drive that acts its own shared storage server, allowing other computers to connect to it via the wifi/ethernet. They’re simpler and cheaper to set up than a dedicated server, and will solve your basic need of “sharing files across a local network without access to the internet”.

So you don’t necessarily NEED a separate server on your network, unless you are running some sort of enterprise networking software like Microsoft SharePoint. Long story short, in the 80s and 90s you might’ve needed dedicated servers and special software and dedicated system administrators and such to handle a basic small biz network, but these days being able to share files is such a common requirement that it’s really a lot easier, as simple as dropping in a network drive.

The TRICKY part is that in the 10 years since then, a lot this has moved to the cloud, because places realized it’s much cheaper to pay Google or Microsoft $5 a month than to recreate all of that locally, which is what you’re trying to do. What puts you in a bind is that the economies of scale of the cloud providers means that this problem is usually solved not by “let’s make our own awesome LAN” but “oh, let’s just get a faster internet connection for the office”. You don’t seem to have that option.

So while having a simple file sharing drive is trivial – literally just a network and a network drive (or a USB hard drive plugged into your router) – it gets much more complex once you want to add team collaboration features like the ability to seamlessly edit the same document together, or shared calendaring, team messaging, etc. All of that would be really trivial on the internet, but difficult and expensive to set up on your own for your own private network…

I’m not very knowledgeable about that, so hopefully someone else can offer advice…? I think what you’re looking for are team collaboration tools that work over the intranet. Microsoft SharePoint comes to mind, but the management/administrative overhead, not to mention licensing costs, might be very high. I’m not sure who else is this space… it’s one thing if you’re building a company intranet for 5000 employees, but for 5 people, it’s a LOT of expense…

Edit: Sorry, that was a bit longwinded. in Summary:

  • Super simple: Basic office network (wifi or ethernet) + network attached storage drive (or USB drive connected to your router) = simple file sharing. You’ll have to figure out what happens when multiple people want to work on the same doc at the same time.
  • Super complex: The above + collaboration server and software that helps you navigate shared editing, calendaring, customer databases, order records, etc. WITHOUT internet access
19

@Tripler

You don’t need any server to network computers into a LAN, and you don’t need a server to set up a synchronized shared folder among a bunch of computers.

ETA how easy/hard is, e.g., setting up a LAN? That’s a trick question, isn’t it? It’s not hard, let’s say, but if you have never done it before and have no idea how it is supposed to work…

20

True, but this:

Depending on the employees’ workflows, if many people are working on the same files all the time, there are bound to be edit conflicts. That means lost records, conflicting customer data, etc. Even with a good CRM and order management system, it’s hard to keep it all straight. To try to do that manually with just a bunch of shared files in folders… it’s gonna get real messy, real fast =/

Tripler: Essentially, you can try to deal with those workflow issues through the humans (employee training) or through the tech (complicated order/customer databases), but one way or another you’ll have to think that through…

If there’s any way you can get better internet out there, it would probably be worth the investment. Some ISPs will run fiber or DSL out to you, or install WiMax/satellite internet, for a few grand upfront… while that sounds expensive, it’s probably going to be cheaper over 5-10 years than having to manage your own LAN and hire the people to manage it.

21

Oh, don’t remember if this was already mentioned, but it’s also worth checking to check your 4G cell coverage out there. If you can get a 4G router/personal hotspot puck, that should be adequate internet, way faster than dialup, and could make this whole issue a lot simpler.