The Situation:  A foundation with a New York City headquarters had a conference center upstate.  Documents to be shared with conference center staff had to be emailed to them and foundation staff had no access to their own or shared documents on the headquarters computer system when at the conference center.  In addition the conference center did not have a file server. For that reason, conference center staff were storing documents on their own computers, which were not being backed up.  Further, staff at the conference center had no simple capability for sharing documents among themselves.

What We Did:  We installed a site-to-site Virtual Private Network (VPN) between the New York Headquarters and the conference center using features of the firewalls that each used. We also installed a server that was part of the main office system that allowed conference center and headquarters staff  access to shared documents on the headquarters server.  The server also had file storage for staff members' files as well as shared file storage for the whole conference center.

The Result:  Conference center staff started storing their own and shared files on the file server. In addition, they had access to shared files at the headquarters office, so that working with headquarters staff was easier.  Headquarters staff who brought laptops to the conference center were able to connect with their own  and shared files on the headquarter server.  In addition, headquarters staff could print directly to printers at the conference center from their offices, increasing the timeliness of document preparation and reducing the need to move paper between headquarters and the conference center.