2.4. Sharing Resources with Other Computers

One of the main reasons to give someone else an account on your machine is to share resources with them. A resource is any device, data, or piece of software on your server. Often, you'll share a device such as a printer because it's expensive and you can't afford to provide one for each user on the network. Other situations require that you share data between people collaborating on a project by sharing a hard drive or folder. In fact, you'll find many reasons to share server resources and that's really the main reason that you have a server in the first place.

In this chapter, you see how to share the most common resource, the hard drive. Microsoft provides a number of methods to share resources with others (many similar to the techniques used to create user accounts). The best policy is to know all of these techniques so that you can use the technique that works best in a particular situation. Of course, you don't want to learn all of those techniques on the first try. The following steps show the easiest method for sharing hard drive resources. You'll find other methods in the chapters that follow.