Hi All, I've been tasked with networking a small office (10 PCs) from the ground up (everything new), and I've been out of the game for many years. Given an environment where it's OK for all users to have full rights to all data, does anyone see any downside to just having Win7 Business on all the machines, using a Homegroup for networking and having all the data on one machine? I'm willing to go with Windows Server 2008 if necessary, but, given that a Homegroup has no connection limit and also that the workload will be modest (Word, Excel, no hungry applications of any kind) is there any compelling reason not to just use Windows 7 Pro and pass on Server?

Hi, To answer your question, you can use HomeGroup for networking and save data on certain machine in the network. In HomeGroup, each machine can share and access data without permission. To join HomeGroup, the user should put the correct password. In the same network, only one HomeGroup can be created. For more information about HomeGroup, please refer to the following article: Windows 7 HomeGroup However, if you would like apply some security policy, group policy or network access protection, it’s highly recommended to install Windows Server 2008 and create a domain to manage the network. For more information about Windows Server 2008, please refer to the following article: Security and Policy Enforcement Thanks, Novak