Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations Chris Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Mass Storage Strategy - Advice please!

Status
Not open for further replies.

Stevehewitt

IS-IT--Management
Jun 7, 2001
2,075
GB
Hi all,

Not really too techy, but more of a strategy question really....

Most companies I've worked at before have had a tiered storage approach such as:


- "personal" documents are to be stored in either a home drive or "My Documents" (which I've redirected to a server)

- Documents to be shared department wide are shared in a department network drive which nobody outside of the department can access

- A global company-wide network drive used to share files with the rest of the organisation. In some circumstances IT would create a folder with special permissions restricting access to a few departments or cross-department staff where required


So there's three levels - personal, departmental and company-wide.

However at my current place of work things aren't as simple. We do a lot of cross-department project work, and additionally a number of people are not part of any particular department at all (we have a "consultant" on the board, a strategic developer who reports directly to the MD, Purchasing and product development both report to the HR director!!
Some people are actually split 50/50 between departments.


So I'm a little stuck - as all my previous experience has been in a more structured and strictly controlled environment. Sticking to having department drives alone isn't a good idea as the management overhead of adding individual users rather than groups (or creating new ad-hoc groups so often!) is too high.

What do you do in your environment? Have a 3-tier system as above but with file access permissions groups different to distribution and other securtiy groups? E.G a "Finance File Access" group and also a seperate "Finance" group, where non-Finance department members can be added to the former group?

Perhaps a more managed approach where you have a department folder under a single all-incompassing drive - under each department folder it's public read access and department write, then one or two special two-way folders for "special relationships" between departments like sales and marketing, followed by a single folder for just marketing alone...?
Is this matched in group membership structure within AD too?

How do you manage your users documents, shares and network drives? In particular inter-department documents, ad-hoc projects and "special" users who don't really belong to any particular department at all...?

Hope this makes some sense!

Cheers,


Steve.

Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson
 
Have a share called "Shared Documents". Share it to domain users. In there have "Marketing". NTFS that to Marketing as full control, Sales to read, HR to deny or whatever. Repeat for all folders / departments.
 
How would DFS Help? We'd only be looking at using a couple of fileservers.

Think a shared documents folder maybe a good idea. I'll have a play with some models.

Thanks,



Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top