Directory accounts for small business.

[chrfr]

Hi.
I may be using the wrong terminology here and actually a NAS might be just what I need but I'm looking at moving away from local accounts to ones that are managed centrally.
I fear I'm out of my depth already actually, having spent the night reading about LDAP and Active Directory. Not things you can pick up quickly it would seem.

Problem with Dropbox is that a location on my local machine doesn't work the same on the local machines of others, for example if I want to issue a spreadsheet and have the external references pulled from a location that I manage, it won't work for the others.

Managing user accounts is nontrivial and is not worth the effort for just a few users. Get a NAS and put your files there. The files will then be in a common location for everyone.

 

[hobowankenobi]

Hi.
I may be using the wrong terminology here and actually a NAS might be just what I need but I'm looking at moving away from local accounts to ones that are managed centrally.
I fear I'm out of my depth already actually, having spent the night reading about LDAP and Active Directory. Not things you can pick up quickly it would seem.

Problem with Dropbox is that a location on my local machine doesn't work the same on the local machines of others, for example if I want to issue a spreadsheet and have the external references pulled from a location that I manage, it won't work for the others.

While remote user accounts were a thing in the days of old, all modern OSes do so much local caching and have so much activity that we don't even see (auto-saves, preferences, temp files, etc.) that make modern devices so good and so fast...it stopped being practical to try and push all the data in an entire user directory. File syncing has replaced that completely.

Even in the best if times, only one user could modify a file at any one time. Whoever opened the file first got read/write access, and all others were read-only. If a user group was more than a few users, or users wanted to share an often updated file, this method was always problematic.

Once Google popularized the ability for multiple users to change a file concurrently, Microsoft and Apple followed. One of the biggest reasons most orgs use either Google Apps of O365. Cloud access for all, plus nearly unlimited access and collaboration for primary tools: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

No file server will ever compete...unless somebody rolls out concurrent access at the OS/file level.

 

[hobowankenobi]

To be clear, directory servers are still a thing...it's just they primarily manage user credentials and access, not directly storing user data. It's fantastic to have one user name and password for multiple devices, networks, services, etc...and that's what a directory server provides. User data and files...are somewhere else. Most often on a cloud service.