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We are dividing our company into two companies. All employees will be shared across both the companies. We have separate Accounting systems, email and other applications for both companies.

There are two physical offices located within the same city block. And identical infrastructure at both. Money is not a limiting factor.

We are currently discussing having the users at each site access "Company A" systems via their workstation and access "Company B" systems via a VM workstation. Most users want to have multiple sessions of outlook and other applications (for each company) open at the same time. This configuration seems doable but I'm not sure if there are better ways to set it up.

How would you design the network, remote access, and configure the workstations?

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Why do you need double the infrastructure? Why didn't you just add a second domain to your email system for the second company, make sure everyone knows how to change the "send from" in Outlook or whatever so that outbound email is always coming from the correct company, and call it good?

The Accounting packages I've seen allow multiple companies, they didn't require additional systems. Email (as I say above) doesn't need a second system for a second company. Fileserving, external web hosting, etc etc - these don't need separate new systems to serve additional entities.

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  • The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.
    – MDMarra
    Apr 22, 2010 at 2:26
  • Yes, however, I do not know of an accounting package that can open 2 companies at once.
    – solefald
    Apr 22, 2010 at 2:33
  • @solefald - you mean, for a single user at the same time? If they're done as separate companies, maybe not - but there's plenty of cases (posting payments, paying bills, AP and AR stuff) where your accounting clerk shouldn't have both companies open, for the risk of doing something in the wrong company. And lots of software is available via webapps now (I know AccPac does) so they could have two browser windows open. Of course, you could do this in an accounting pkg as one company with two departments, but I'm sure there's business/legal reasons not to.
    – mfinni
    Apr 22, 2010 at 4:08
  • No, i meant something like quickbooks (most popular small business package). Lets say they have 1 computer that holds both company files and shares via quickbooks group access. You will only be able to have 1 company file open and shared at one time, so they would need one computer for each company, if each company would want to work with their quickbooks file during the day.
    – solefald
    Apr 22, 2010 at 4:20
  • We need to have separate infrastructure for legal reasons, certainly not from a tech standpoint. As @mfinni correctly points out. The attorneys have told us to keep everything separate. So if we sell one company it's a clean separation. I'm not sure we have discovered all of the ramifications this will have. Some users have requested two computers at their desk.
    – Shanghai360
    Apr 22, 2010 at 17:59
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Do you have a question about something specific?

From the information you provided, the only thing i can think of would be a VPN tunnel between 2 offices so employees can get from A to B and vice versa...

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