HELP: Small Business Windows Network Setup

[jchen82]

Hi guys, we know what we want, but we are not sure how to get there. So, I'm here looking foe help.

What we have right now:

We are a very small non-profit organization with less than 10 employees. Currently, each employee has his/her own Windows rig connected to a workgroup. Some are running Windows XP and some are Windows 8. None of the rigs have passwords. We also have a QNAP NAS hooked to the network serving as a file backup unit. The best I can describe the situatuon is that, the setup we have is very much a home network

What we are looking for:

We want to be able to have the Group Policy capability, being able to manage and administrate multiple Windows rigs.

We have a lot of questions regarding to how to set up the scenario we are looking for. Here are two questions I could think of at the moment.

1. In order to have Group Policy capability, do we need to be running Windows Server on a dedicated rig 24/7?

2. Any other options besides Windows Server?

Thanks!

[Alibaladin]

One question. Why do you think you need to do this?

[jchen82]

Due to the nature of our organization, we have a lot of people (volunteers) who are not employees coming and going in our office and many of them are on our rigs quite often.

This could be problematic because some of them store their personal files on there and this also open the risk of people stealing our data (we have nothing to hide, but we still would like to keep the data safe and within the organization).

 

So we would like to have the ability to manage our rigs and accounts.