WorkGroup or Homegroup

ThrashZone · 27 Feb 2016

Not sure about the wireless home group stuff
I have primarily a wired home group established and win-10 refused to connect said it was not possible

I was okay with it and didn't go through exiting all machines and creating a new in win-10 mostly because I don't use 10 all that much
I have win-7 on the same machine as 10 and use it more so no big deal if when on 10 it's not connected to the home group.

I just chalked it up to 10 wants to be the alpha and recreating the home group in win-10 would fix the issue.

Barman58 · 27 Feb 2016

I guess I was lucky

I never had any issues with my homegroup migrating from 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 with a mix of OS in all upgrade operations at one time or another

ThrashZone · 27 Feb 2016

At one time and throughout testing i had no issues either joining a existing home group
I may have used a wrong setting in setup on network choices

I believe a clean install might correct it :/

copiman · 27 Feb 2016

Barman58 said:

In your situation with the small business clients - I would go with a workgroup, as it supports back to XP, (the structure actually comes from the NT/Windows 2000 line which it probably also supports as long as the hardware is complaint).

The only issue with a workgroup is there is more work for you as the sysadmin, you need to create, (and maintain), identical users, preferably with identical passwords, on all systems, (or at least all systems that any one individual user has access to), to allow any degree of real control.

For your home system it may be a chance to test the waters for the homegroup, (again with password security), for future use, the major advantage to this is that you only need to join each user to the Homegroup and use a single password, Disadvantages are the over zealous initial sharing regime that is set up

I agree that workgroup would be best for business. I am going to do this at home to become familiar with it. Once I feel good with it I will work with the homegroup as well. For me hands on is a much better learning tool that reading. Unfortunately, reading is something I have to bear.

Thanks for your help.

copiman · 29 Feb 2016

I have come to the conclusion that using workgroups is too much of a hassle. One minute it starts to work and the next minute everything goes to pot. Not to mention if I'm having this much trouble I can only imagine what an end user would endure. Having said that, how would three computers share only what each computer wants to share with the other computers. For instance computer 1 wants to share something with computer 2 and not computer 3 but also not give them access to see everything on my drive. Basically I need to be able to share info on the network but have control over who sees what. I know a server would work but that cost way to much and just doesn't seem practice. What do most small businesses do in situations like this?

Barman58 · 29 Feb 2016

Am in car at moment, when I get back later I should be able to guide you intend right direction

Barman58 · 01 Mar 2016

The use of workgroup in the business environment is reliant on several factors

The creation of identical users on each system ( this may be also controlled by using groups as used in a true Client Server system )
The management of the created users (either by the user or a sysadmin)
The creation of suitable shares in all systems that need to share data ( it's possible that these shares may be large and small in number - Whole drives shared)
The use of NTFS security settings at a file system level to actually control access

As an example we will look at three User - System

User A has data that must be shared to User B but not User C, in a sub folder, (Sales), of their main DATA folder and another folder (costs) that is reversed

User A creates a share of the Data folder and adds Both User B and User C to have read (or read / write), access
User A sets the NTFS permissions to the Sales Folder so that User A has Access rights but User B does Not, and the NTFS permissions for the Costs folder are set so that Only user B has access.

In the workgroup system the Share allows the connection between the systems and the NTFS rights control the access rights,

The simple sharing option allows only the sharing of the complete share to all users you need the advanced sharing to control multiple share rights as discussed above

I will add that once you've done a few of these type of workgroups it becomes easier but it's never totally straightforward, when it gets to 10 systems with more that a couple of users you should really look at a true Client-Server system but I know this scares CFO's (Accountants), a lot