Work from home/remote access conundrum

that he could start working from home on days he didn't feel like
coming in to the office. Now I, as Network Administrator have been
tasked with making that promise a reality.

Here is the pertinent information:

* We are running a Windows Server 2003 domain with a .local extension.
* All clients are running Windows XP+SP2
* The engineer will need to use Autodesk Inventor and Mechanical
Desktop in order to do his job.

At first I thought that perhaps he could use Terminal Services to
remotely access his desktop and work that way. Unfortunately, due to
the intense graphical requirements of 3-D CAD applications, my idea
will not work. In fact, we already tested this setup on our local
gigabit network and it was unbearable trying to even rotate a part
assembly. I can only begin to imagine what would happen over a much
slower connection.

So the idea of using RDP or a VPN to access the engineer's workstation
remotely is out of the question.

Our other option would be to set up an identical machine at his home,
and permit it to log in to the domain. I'm not sure what ports would
have to be open, or if by opening those ports I would be opening up the
network to remote exploitation.

If it's not reasonable to open up the network, then our next option
would be to make a copy of all the engineering drawings to an external
USB drive, and then before he decides to work a day at home and
whenever he comes in to work, he would synchronize any changes he made.
This poses the problem of being able to ensure accurate
synchronization--that we wouldn't accidentally overwrite files that
should remain unchanged, or that we fail to overwrite a file that needs
to be overwritten. Shouldn't there be software that could do this?

The other thing I was thinking about was the possibility of having a
dedicated connection of some sort that only connected from the
engineer's house to our network. I believe this is possible, but I
cannot for the life of me recall the proper term for such a connection.
If anyone knows what I am trying to talk about, please let me know.

So that's where I stand with this. If I have posted this to the wrong
group, would someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction
(after flaming me if it makes you feel better ;-) )?

Thanks in advance for any help.

.

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