So far we have 3 branches located in different region, around 5-10 employees per branch with their own laptop

Some problems I found is whenever laptop crash or need to be reinstalled, it will be pain in ass since we only have 1 IT guy, which is me, in the main branch (it will take around 3-4 hours of commuting to reach other branch and fix it for them)

Also we store our data at one master GDrive and share the files to each employee, but I found it difficult for the employee to search the stored data, since the shared files will be in shortcut form, not the actual data itself and windows can’t search the file content, this will be pain in ass for my sales person since they need to search the file’s content for specific invoice or customer name

Is there any selfhosted tool that can make my life easier as the only IT guy in this company?

  • GrumpyCat79@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There’s a zillion things you can do and implement for those kind of situation. If I was you, I would at least start by having:

    • At least a spare laptop/computer in each branch, ready to go
    • An image ready to be deployed on a laptop I need to reinstall with minimal configuration afterwards (only employee specific stuff)
    • A remote monitoring/remote control app like Meshcentral, to be able to fix (most) issues without driving to the branches

    I don’t know if your company use GSuite for all their needs (docs, emails, etc). If the answer is yes, then it might be difficult to migrate from GDrive, but otherwise, I would replace it with something else.

    If your salesperson need to look for a customer name INSIDE their files, they are not storing/naming them efficiently. I don’t know the business you are in, how many customers you deal with and how many invoices a customers can have but here’s a few ideas:

    Invoices/Customer XYZ/2023-10-16 Invoice 1234.pdf

    Invoices/Customer XYZ/2023-10-16 Computer Replacement Project.pdf

    Invoices/2023/2023-10-16 Customer XYZ - Invoice 1234.pdf

    Projects/Customer XYZ/Project Name/Date - Invoice Number - Whatever.pdf

    That’s just examples, but I would say that the kind of “metadata” they are looking for should be somewhere else than just in the content of the files