>>> I am an IT manager for a roofing company here in the southwest part of the United States, and the owner is wanting the following: 1) The owner wants to be able to scan all of his job files into "networked" storage for retrieval when he is out on the road (he and his brother [the VP/Treasurer]) wants this ability to look at any files from whereever they are (and I seen this is possible with the file manager utility which I have been playing with on my 1GB storage I have tried out.
He can use either DriveHQ Online Backup or DriveHQ FileManager client software for that. If he has a lot of files that he wants to backup, then use DriveHQ Online Backup is better. Files backed up by DriveHQ Online Backup can be accessed online from anywhere using DriveHQ Online Backup, DriveHQ FileManager, DriveHQ.com website or any FTP client (incl. Windows Explorer).
If he needs to automatically upload files to DriveHQ cloud storage, and if he needs to edit some files in the cloud storage, then DriveHQ FileManager is the best option. DriveHQ FileManager works just like Windows Explorer (or FTP), you can easily drag and drop files / folders between local and remote storage. Moreover, DriveHQ supports automatic folder synchronization; so he can sync a local folder with a remote folder. This way, he can access the remote folder online from anywhere. To create a sync task, just select a folder in DriveHQ FileManager and click on the Synchronize button.
Also, there are approx. 20 people within the company who might need to access this "potential network" as well. Question, what is the best solution to have for 1) setting up a "network",
There is really no setup; you just sign up our service and it is ready!
The only setup I can think of is to install DriveHQ FileManager, which is not required for light users. DriveHQ FileManager (or DriveHQ Online Backup) is recommended if you will use our service frequently, or if you need to upload large amount of data. Other FTP client can also be used to drag and drop files / folders. Windows Explorer can act as a simple FTP client, just enter:
ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ftp.drivehq.com/
2) accounting for those 20 users, who would need access to view only their own files, and nothing else,
You can use our group account service, which is extremely useful and flexible. The group account service itself is free, which also offers 1 free sub-user license. So you can test it for free. More user licenses can be ordered at a very low price of only $6/user/year (i.e. $0.5/user/month only!) All sub-users of a paid group account are also considered as premium users.
Once you become a group account, you can easily create/add/edit/delete/disable sub-users; you can change a sub-user's username / password and thus re-use the sub-user account for other people or for other purpose.
You can create folders in your own account and share to different users with different levels of access rights; you can also create sub-groups if you have multiple locations. There are 4 types of sub-users: Group Admin, Sub-group admin, regular member and guest user. You can create guest user accounts for your clients.
The group owner account can also use the group admin feature to allocate / re-allocate storage space and download bytes among group members at any time.
3) Can selected users have read-write privileges where they can do any maintenance (like file deletion as needed)? I hope I have made a good set of questions, but any help would greatly be appreciate, or any direction would greatly be appreciated.
Yes, as mentioned above, the group owner can create folders in its own account, then share different folders to different users with different levels of access rights, incl read-only and read-write (full access) rights. When a sub-user logs on, he/she can only see folders shared to him/her in the special folder:
\DriveHQ Share\YOUR_USERNAME\SHARE_NAME
( Also, by default, the system creates some sample folders and files in all user accounts, such as "My Documents", "WWWHome" etc. these folders are private to each user. Each user has full access to all files / folders in its own account. If you don't want sub-users to have files / folders in their own accounts, you can logon as the sub-user(s) and delete those default folders / files. )