What is VPN?

What stops a Windows user from opening a password protected file via a VPN connection, and password is known?

• When the user is in the office, she has no problem connecting to our domain with her laptop and opening a password-protected Excel file on a shared drive on a Windows Server 2003 machine. But when she goes home, with the same laptop, and connects to the same machine with VPN (and the VPN server is the same machine with the file she needs, but has a 2nd IP address for the VPN connection so she can see the resources), she never gets a prompt for the password to open the file. The VPN server is newly setup on this server, and was initially told it was "slower" than the previous one. I duplicated the settings from the old one to the new one, for Routing and Remote Access, and it sped things up, but when it was slow or fast, the password protected files still would not open. What do I need to change to allow this? -Ed

• Answer:

  can she open the non-encrypted files within the same share ? And she has the SAME version of Excel ? (note: the workbook can be password protected and NOT be encrypted, encryption is another setting altogether.)