Connecting a Windows network to an RM managed Network

[Scruff]

Morning all, hope the new term is going well for eveyone.

I have been asked to come up with a solution for sharing data between two physical sites seperated by about 15-20 miles. We have recently become federated with another school and as such some of our pupils will travel to the other site on occasion and need access to their data. One of the networks (mine) is a windows 2000/2003 network with a 10mbit connection to the outside world and the other site is an RM managed network which i know nothing about.

At the moment it is currently just a data sharing exercise so I need to review all possible solutions be it hosting of data on puplic servers maybe a vpn solution maybe a wan.

Does anyone have any experiance with this type of project or any input they would like to share to help with my appraisal and proposal process ?

Cheers
Rob

[Oops_my_bad]

If you are "officially" federated then I would say you need to open discussions with the people who manage the RM network (good luck with that). Once you've done that then you can go about setting a federation up between your networks. If RM are solely managing the remote network then I suspect you will face resistance.

Are both schools within the same LEA/WAN? If so then you should hopefully benefit from a decent connection between the 2 sites with relatively low latency, otherwise it could get a bit sticky and then you need to start looking at site to site VPN's and that kind of thing.

[Scruff]

We are officially federated and within the same WAN. I believe the other site isn't managed by RM but they utilise the RM suite of network management tools and client software so access to the servers isn't a problem.

This is more of a technical query with regards to all the options and the pro's/con's of each. I'd like to know the pitfalls before I encounter them myself and wish I hadn't started =)

Cheers
Rob

[Nij.UK]

vpn solution would be nice. but i think you might be able to get away with just setting up WebDAV which yr users would long in and could see there files and folders via a browser window.

Im not sure how successful the web solution is, but im sure others who have used/use it will comment

[mjs_mjs]

with the invention of vle/mle/lp's and portals - is there any need for anything like this?