Working between offices

[KGC]

Hi all,

We are a small-medium firm, looking to open a third office.

Currently we have 2 offices with a server in each. Currently the method to retrieving information from the offices is to use an FTP site of Yousendit.com

This works for the most part, but i know that we will need something better then this shortly, especially with the addition of a third office. I have looked into using a VPN network or something similar and have spoken to a couple of these companies, but a couple of issues (hypothetical) that we kept running into was that of bandwidth and connections at the individual offices.

I would be interested to know what some smaller offices with multiple locations are doing for this.

Thank you guys.
Kenton

EDIT:
After reading through some threads, i have found some answers regarding to working on the same Revit or AutoCAD models or drawings. But what of support files and standards. I keep a folder on the server with all the support files and cad standards as well as the library. Would i just make sure that i am the only one editing these and just make sure that when they change in one office that they get changed in the next?

Thanks.

[cadtag]

The simplest thing is probably to run an XCopy of your support folders. At one point I had 30+/- dispersed offices, and set up a batch file than simply ran an Xcopy from my 'master folders' to each of the remote CAD servers. it might take 4 or more hours to run if there were a lot of updates, but that's what off-hours are for. And, it did not run regularly, but was triggered manually when I decided the updates were ready to push.

There are fancier tools for replication around too that you could look at..