Net profits - small-office networking options - includes vendor directory and related article on small company's network - Industry Trend or Event

Home Office Computing, May, 1996 by Dennis Eskow

Networking is the small-business tool of the '90s. You already network all the time--with colleagues at professional gatherings and cocktail parties, and with clients at meetings and lunches. Now, all the reasons that drive you to connect with other people are driving you to connect your computer equipment.

Maybe you need one scanner to work with multiple computers. Or you want to send documents from office to office Without copying them to a disk or running them off on your printer. Perhaps you want to invite all those customers and colleagues to contact anyone in your office Online and exchange documents and drawings. But if you've heard computer networking stories from the corporate world, the prospect may seem downright scary. Isn't networking all about wires and expensive software and consultants? isn't it a financial black hole? Does a small venture have any business considering building a network in 1996?

The good news is that computer networking isn't necessarily about complex wiring schemes and expensive software--although at the high end it still can be. You can create a simple link between two or three PCs and printers for less than $300, build your own Internet mail for less than $2,000 ($10,000 with all the hardware), or fashion a corporate-quality network--including a few PCs, a couple of laptops, a printer or two, and a shared scanner, modem, and CD-ROM drive--for less than $5,000.

And in most cases, you won't need a consultant. The small-office networking market is expected to explode over the next two years--Link Resources reports that 500,000 small businesses have networks today and more than 11 million have multiple PCs and printers, as yet unconnected. Thus, many network vendors have free forums on Compuserve, America Online, and increasingly, the Internet (for locations, see "Network Connections," which accompanies this article). Hang out at one of these sites for a few days and you'll soon find where questions about businesses like yours are answered. In addition, companies such as Artisoft, ACC, Cisco, Farallon, IBM, Microsoft, and Novell are offering online and live seminars all across the country. Although the information tends to be self-serving, it's good enough to help you get a handle on terminology.

Because there's more than one way to network, we've come up with five common small-business scenarios to help you identify the networking technology that's best for you. Let's start with the simplest and work our way up to the sublime. (All software, unless noted, is available for Windows and Mac.)

CHECK OUT THE REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

You have a laptop and two other computers, and you need to exchange information with clients.

Let's say you and two partners share a small space and you each keep sales records on Excel spreadsheets. The way you work now, whenever one of you wants to update data on the sales records, you have to type it in and then give your partners a copy of the updated records on disk. This leaves lots of room for errors, and trying to find out whose record is the most up-to-date can drive you crazy. But if just one of your three systems is running Windows 95, you can use a remote control application such as Traveling Software's LapLink ($149) to connect the three systems. (For more information on LapLink and other remote control packages, see the software roundup in this issue.) Just install LapLink software on the Win 95 machine and load the program's file transfer applications on the other two systems, and you'll be able to link two machines via serial port and the third by infrared.

This solution is a bit crude and it requires the systems to be just a few feet apart, but it'll let you transfer files among the three computers. What's more, you can send e-mail between the systems without using an online account.

In addition to its in-house possibilities, remote software lets you transfer files via modem (thus removing the distance restriction), provided the other computer is on and running the same remote control application. Microcom's Carbon Copy for Windows 3.0 ($120), a remote computing package long used by corporate help desks, even includes a chat box that works like an Internet chat room: Users on both ends can send messages back and forth live and view documents simultaneously.

At such a low cost you won't get a lot of speed, so if you need to transfer files constantly, this isn't the solution for you. With too many transfers, screens start to freeze up, and graphical files take a long time to go through.

"But it's a great way to send a couple of things each day," says New York database consultant Kurt Monash, who uses remote software to transfer files between his office and a Boston client. "I've never had a glitch."

Thanks to Win 95, you can now also use remote control software to network through the Internet. With LapLink's special Internet tools and Win 95's protocol, you can use any Internet service provider, such as Pipeline or The Well, as a switch between computers that share an Internet TCP/IP address. Just load up LapLink, configure your computer as instructed, click on your Win 95 Network Neighborhood icon, and click on the TCP/IP communications program. Next, tell both machines what your TCP/IP address is (you cart get that from your Internet service provider) and enter that number in your LapLink and Win 95 systems. Now you can network from your notebook anywhere in the country.