So far we have 3 branches located in different region, around 5-10 employees per branch with their own laptop
Some problems I found is whenever laptop crash or need to be reinstalled, it will be pain in ass since we only have 1 IT guy, which is me, in the main branch (it will take around 3-4 hours of commuting to reach other branch and fix it for them)
Also we store our data at one master GDrive and share the files to each employee, but I found it difficult for the employee to search the stored data, since the shared files will be in shortcut form, not the actual data itself and windows can’t search the file content, this will be pain in ass for my sales person since they need to search the file’s content for specific invoice or customer name
Is there any selfhosted tool that can make my life easier as the only IT guy in this company?
I’ve been an IT guy (professionally) for over 35 years. If this is your major use case, why complicate things by self hosting anything?
Get rid of your (presumably Windoze) laptops and replace them with Chromebooks. Capital cost of equipment is much lower (due to no MS licensing and lower hardware demands), no constant updates, no antivirus required, and best of all, if things get messed up it takes literally one minute to reset back to factory defaults (powerwash) and another few minutes after login you will have a completely restored to normal laptop. Even if you guy a new one, all settings get transferred from the cloud upon first login, within minutes, and it looks and acts exactly as before. If no reset is required and all you need to do is a little hand holding, the Chrome Remote Desktop allows you to do so by remote control, even from a Windoze machine. This is why they are so great for tech-challenged people, seniors, kids who like to mess with things, and probably for your business. All you would need if you don’t already have it, is a separate Google account per user. Best to assign these rather than have them use their personal account. Then share your GDrive to all users. Since everything is stored and done in the cloud they should have no problems searching for things. They will also have access to the full suite of Google office apps and 15GB of ‘personal’ cloud storage per account in addition to your shared file store.
I use worksuite, so everyone has their own account
The problem is, our files stored at ‘main’ account, then shared to every employee
The shared files will be in shortcut version and it’s pretty impossible to search the content of the files