Office staff and Laptops

[bollo318]

Hi

 

I have a member of staff who runs the special unit attached to our school. She does a lot of home visits and sometimes works from home and away from the school site.

She has been given a laptop to use but also has a desktop PC in the office, which she tends to use when in school.

 

The school is on CC4, including Easylink.

 

She has recently complained about the speed of the desktop PC (which is an older dell optiplex - Pentium D 2.6GHz and 1GB RAM). She also struggles with the use of her documents. Until very recently she has been saving all her documents onto the desktop, which is saved locally to the HDD. This worries me because of security and also backup, so I've really encouraged her to use her home area.

Her laptop is CC4 build and I've allowed offline files and folders and made her home drive available offline.

Trouble is that her laptop doesn't seem to come into school too often, so doesn't sync with her home folder.

 

I'm thinking how to improve the situation and of course it all comes up with pros and cons:

 

I could wipe both the laptop and the PC and make them vanilla XP and map the drives. But if anything gets saved on her laptop then I have no way of automatically backing up her data.

I could make both Vanilla and instruct her on how to use Easylink to gain access to her documents, which means that her data is safe. But then she is restricted to using her computer with an internet connection.

 

I could give her an encrypted external HDD but if that fails then the data is lost.

 

I could take away her desktop and leave her with the laptop but also leave a tft monitor, keyboard and mouse on her desk for comfort.

 

How would you do this?

[Guest Guest]

Take away the desktop, I'd probably have planned several different ways to murder you if I was still on a Pentium D!

 

Seems the easiest way to me, with offline files atleast you've got a backup each time she comes into school

[MatthewL]

Simple answer, one or the other. I.e. the laptop, if it is been used out and about make sure it is encrypted. Also look at using VPN to save files been saved to the device i.e. RDP or VPN.