[dba-VB] Access data across the internet

I am looking at doing an application in C# that needs to be able to run on user systems around the 
country, but manipulate data in a common location.  IOW employees can be anywhere, running this 
program on their machine, but reading / writing data to a central server.

It is a fairly simple application in terms of the data, a hand full of fairly stable and short list 
tables that feed combos, and a couple of "log" kind of tables that document processes.  It would be 
nice to have access to a fairly complex directory structure containing data files that need to be 
imported by and exported from this program.  Again these files are small, less than a thousand lines 
of data, fixed width or CSV.  I am looking at the files now and the largest appear to be 80K or so.

I am thinking that a VPN tunnel to allow access to the data directories, which are then mapped to a 
drive on the local workstation.  Some kind of data store on the server, perhaps SQL Server Express. 
  A local data store to do the import into, manipulation / cleanup of data, export back to files on 
the remote server directory structure.

I am wondering if you guys have experience in setting up this kind of a server and application to 
work on such a server.

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com