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Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
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Now that you have decided that more than one PC would be a good idea, you rapidly run into the following:
You realize that the letter you were writing at home is on the hard disk inside your computer at home and not on the hard disk on your computer at work.
A customer calls and you need to look up their service history and the "other PC" which is used to handle customer records is busy printing month end invoices.
You have to print a letter and the letter quality laser printer is connected to the "other PC" which is being used.
You get the drift, multiple PCs are a cost effective productivity improvement tool, but in order to realize the full benefits of sharing equipment, i.e., printers and information, i.e., customer records, you need to connect or "network" the PCs. For most businesses networking comes in two flavors:
Remote networking for PCs that use the phone lines to connect. Usually just two PCs are involved.
Local Area Network (LANs) used for PCs that can be connected by cables.
In some cases, both networking types are used. A LAN at your place of business and remote networking for off-hours access to information and programs.
We’ll look at each of these options in terms of equipment required and estimates of on-going costs.