My friends business is mostly 3-5 people working from home and he wants a central file storage for everyone to use like a disk drive on their PC. 1 Machine is Vista, the rest are Win 7.. possibly 1 XP machine. What do you recommend for a secure setup where everyone can access the company files?

ADesign if you're looking for a decent secure setup... I'd suggest simply getting a VPN up and put the client on each PC that is used remotely. (OpenVPN is a good free solution for that).

The issue is they do not have a server or a office, everyone works from home. So they want a central hard drive to store files (mostly PDFs, some word and excel files). Basically they need a file, they double click the Z: drive and have read/write access to company files. Is there a service for this? Rackspace JungleDrive seems close but more of a backup solution?

I haven't seen any services like this (I haven't really looked) but I am also interested it doing something like this. I was thinking of getting a backup account and mounting it as a remote ftp server.

A VPN is very secure than hosted it on a hosting server

The issue is they do not have a server or a office, everyone works from home. So they want a central hard drive to store files (mostly PDFs, some word and excel files). Basically they need a file, they double click the Z: drive and have read/write access to company files. Is there a service for this? Rackspace JungleDrive seems close but more of a backup solution?

I haven't seen any services like this (I haven't really looked) but I am also interested it doing something like this. I was thinking of getting a backup account and mounting it as a remote ftp server.

Just make sure that you read their TOS before signing up for any backup service. Most providers don't allow file sharing on backup servers.

Just make sure that you read their TOS before signing up for any backup service. Most providers don't allow file sharing on backup servers.
I hadn't gotten that far, but that is a good point. Maybe a low end VPS...

Host a Windows VPS in a datacenter and put a pfSense box in front of it, then have your clients connect via OpenVPN.

Another alternative is to use Microsoft's DirectAccess, or install Terminal services on your Windows server and just have people RDP to the box and use the applications installed there. The last option is actually one of the most secure for laptop users as the data they are working with stays on the server and is never downloaded to the laptops, preventing problems if the laptops are lost.

The downside is you can't do much offline.

I hadn't gotten that far, but that is a good point. Maybe a low end VPS...

The main problem with an VPS would be bandwidth. If you host files with a few MB, that shouldn't cause any overages but if host bigger files it could cause a lot of data transfer, depending on the usage.

The main problem with an VPS would be bandwidth. If you host files with a few MB, that shouldn't cause any overages but if host bigger files it could cause a lot of data transfer, depending on the usage.
I was think of getting a 10mbps un-metered VPS so I wouldn't have to worry to much about it.

Yeah,

I have a lot of customers that use encrypted webdav through cPanel.

Thanks,

RSYNC.NET allows unlimited traffic and i think sharing files.
Besdies that Dropbox is awesome, very awesome, and can be free, most likely is free for your utilization (and use the referral system for some extra free space).

I use personally dropbox, and mostly it works great, as long as you remember to close the documents now and then if MS Office handles that document, MS Office disallows other processes reading so dropbox cannot sync! That's the only major gotcha with Dropbox, but not a problem if you do not put a file there which is frequently changed from multiple computers or multiple users.

Also any SFTP/SCP based internet drive solution with ExpanDrive should work.

I'd also get a cheap VPS and set up OpenVPN and a file server of your choice on this VPS. Easy to setup and to maintain.

check out livedrive.com

Check out OpenDrive dot com I never heard of livedrive but it looks the same

umm why dont he get a new computer and install on it teamviewer and they all can use it