Office networking

I run a 27-inch iMac alongside an Apple Cinema Display in my business. I plan to employ someone to work alongside me, so I need to buy a new machine and network them.

My plan is to buy myself a new 5K iMac and to set up my existing late 2010 model for the new person. I have a network set up in my office through my 2TB Time Capsule.

How do I set this up so the new workstation can access the main job folders? What is the best way to set up two Macs in an office so they work harmoniously together? I would also like to be able to stop my employee from being able to delete job folders. Dylan Morton Alan Stonebridge says… You can easily network several Macs together using your Time Capsule’s network. You just need to set up your new iMac so it uses the same Wi-Fi settings as your existing computer. Your employee will still be able to access any job files or folders you have shared (under File Sharing in the Sharing preferences pane), and you can limit what they can do with them. To do that, click on the job file or folder you want them to access, press ç+I, then open the Sharing & Permissions settings. Here you’ll find a list of users, along with their access rights: You can choose from Read & Write, Write Only and Read Only, with the latter being the safest option.

You could also use a versioning process. This is where you or your employee download a copy of a shared file to your individual machine when you want to work on it (moving the original into a Taken folder on your server). You then rename the file you’ve downloaded, so it includes the version number followed by your initials (so workfile.txt becomes workfile.1as.txt, etc). This way you always know who worked on the file last. When you’ve finished working on a file, upload the new version back to the server to share it again. This is what we do on MacFormat and it works really well. It means you should always have a record of changes, either on the server or on each person’s Mac, to refer back to if necessary. We’d also advise making regular backups of your devices in case something goes wrong.