Networking For Dummies

General Networking Articles

Useful Websites for Networking Information

As a network administrator, the Internet is your best friend for networking resources, solutions, news, and guidance. Here are some websites for you to visit often.

General Networking Articles

Network Administration: Granting Share Permissions

When you first create a file share on your network, all users are granted read-only access to the share. If you want to allow users to modify files in the share or allow them to create new files, you need to add permissions. Here’s how to do this using Windows Explorer:

1. Open Windows Explorer by pressing the Windows key and clicking Computer; then browse to the folder whose permissions you want to manage.

2. Right-click the folder you want to manage and then choose Properties from the contextual menu.

   The Properties dialog box for the folder appears.

3. Click the Sharing tab; then click Advanced Sharing.

   The Advanced Sharing dialog box appears.

4. Click Permissions.

   The dialog box shown appears. This dialog box lists all the users and groups to whom you’ve granted permission for the folder. Initially, read permissions are granted to a group called Everyone, which means that anyone can view files in the share but no one can create, modify, or delete files in the share.

   When you select a user or group from the list, the check boxes at the bottom of the list change to indicate which specific permissions you’ve assigned to each user or group.

5. Click the Add button.

   The dialog box shown appears.

6. Enter the name of the user or group to whom you want to grant permission and then click OK.

   If you’re not sure of the name, click the Advanced button. This action brings up a dialog box from which you can search for existing users.

   When you click OK, you return to the Share Permissions tab, with the new user or group added.

7. Select the appropriate Allow and Deny check boxes to specify which permissions to allow for the user or group.

8. Repeat Steps 5–7 for any other permissions that you want to add.

9. When you’re done, click OK.

• If you want to grant full access to everyone for this folder, don’t bother adding another permission. Instead, select the Everyone group and then select the Allow check box for each permission type.

• You can remove a permission by selecting the permission and then clicking the Remove button.

• If you’d rather not fuss with the Share and Storage Management console, you can set the permissions from My Computer. Right-click the shared folder, choose Sharing and Security from the contextual menu, and then click Permissions. Then you can follow the preceding procedure, picking up at Step 5.

• The permissions assigned in this procedure apply only to the share itself. The underlying folder can also have permissions assigned to it. If that’s the case, whichever of the restrictions is most restrictive always applies. If the share permissions grant a user Full Control permission but the folder permission grants the user only Read permission, for example, the user has only Read permission for the folder.

General Networking Articles

Using Workgroup Templates Across Your Network

Although an occasional sacrifice to the Office gods may make your networking life a bit easier, a template isn’t a place of worship. Rather, a template is a special type of document file that holds formatting information, boilerplate text, and other customized settings that you can use as the basis for new documents. Three Office programs — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — enable you to specify a template whenever you create a new document. When you create a new document in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint by choosing File → New, you see a dialog box that lets you choose a template for the new document. Office comes with a set of templates for the most common types of documents. These templates are grouped under the various tabs that appear across the top of the New dialog box. In addition to the templates that come with Office, you can create your own templates in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Creating your own templates is especially useful if you want to establish a consistent look for documents prepared by your network users. For example, you can create a Letter template that includes your company’s letterhead or a Proposal template that includes a company logo. Office enables you to store templates in two locations. Where you put them depends on what you want to do with them:

• The User Templates folder on each user’s local disk drive: If a particular user needs a specialized template, put it here.
• The Workgroup Templates folder on a shared network drive: If you have templates that you want to make available to all network users on the network server, put them here. This arrangement still allows each user to create templates that aren’t available to other network users.

1. In Word, create a new document or open an existing document. It doesn't matter which document you use. This step is required simply because word doesn't let you access the template folder locations unless a document is open.
2. Choose File, and then Options. The Word Options dialog box opens.
3. Click the Advanced tab. The Advanced options appear.
4. Scroll down to the General section and then click the File Locations button. The File Locations dialog box appears.
5. Double-click the Workgroup Templates item. This step opens a dialog box that lets you browse to the location of your template files.
6. Browse to the template files and then click OK. You return to the File Locations dialog box.
7. Click OK to dismiss the File Locations dialog box. You return to the Word Options dialog box.
8. Click OK again. The Word Options dialog box is dismissed.

Although the User Templates and Workgroup Templates settings affect Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can change these settings only from Word. The Options dialog boxes in Excel and PowerPoint don’t show the User Templates or Workgroup Templates options.