[Pc_Support] Suggestions for how to manage satellite offices?

[Damien McKenna]

For one of my jobs they're going to be opening a second office.  Their 
current office has a server (aka a desktop machine with a superiority 
complex) and use a 3rd party for web hosting & email.  The server runs 
Windows 2003 and serves up files, printers & backups for the main 
office.  They use many Windows-only applications and I don't believe are 
in a position to migrate to Linux (which IMHO would make many things 
easier).

I had originally intended setting up a local mail server (Macallan Mail 
Server aka MMS) to work as a local access point for email.  MMS has a 
cool feature in that it can fetch email from another host and store it 
in local mailboxes.  With this my idea was to have the public mail 
server (MX records in the DNS) for the domain be the at the web hosting 
service, have MMS download the email into local mailboxes which can then 
be backed up & managed a bit more readily than if they were remote.

For people working from home (mainly the owner) I was going to set up a 
VPN for him to log into to do his work.

The second office will need access to the files from the first office 
and access to email.  I'm not really sure how the second office will fit 
into my original plans above.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I could manage the two offices' 
facilities?  A VPN sounds like the obvious choice, but what about 
bandwidth usage (if the satellite office grows) and redundancy (if the 
VPN goes down they can't do any work)?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

-- 
Damien McKenna, husband, father, geek.
damien at mc-kenna.com - http://www.mc-kenna.com/