Small Office Networking Setup

Hi everyone,

A bit of background - I am expanding a small business into an office for about 20-25 stations. Currently we only have a small office for 5.

In the new office we have a pretty basic network setup, 2 cat5e cables are ran to each cubicle, one for the PC, one for the VoIP desk phone. The server cabinet is only going to have the modem and switches in there just to get everyone hardwire connected to internet. No actual server.

I will be using Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange with my domain for all of my employees emails and Microsoft Office subscriptions and I plan on using SharePoint to share files as it seems simple. (Been using this with our small team and it seems easy enough to scale up).

One of the challenges I’m facing might seem funny but User Accounts on the computers is making me scratch my head a bit. You see, I plan on setting up the 20 computer stations myself this weekend and I wanted to configure these PCs for my unknown future employees to have pre-installed programs like Chrome, Office, etc, as well as some customization like bookmarks on the browser, the desktop backgrounds as my company logo, and some helpful files like check-lists, guides, and common forms for newer employees to get a better grasp of things. After digging around it looks like Azure has something to do with the solution to my problem but what if I don’t have the user for the PC yet? I don’t know who is going to be at which PC and when setting up windows I’m not sure if I should setup as a personal computer first and make some kind of generic admin account, and follow up with creating a user later when I hire an employee?

Also, it would be cool to have people sign in like you would at an enterprise system like at schools etc. but I’m assuming you’d need a sever for that. I have a cloud server for my sales team’s dialing system but I’d imagine it would be too much of a mess to try and incorporate the user accounts and storage. I don’t think getting a server would be too beneficial for me especially in regards to storage. Each PC has 256gb SSD and we will only have small documents saved on each one with no heavy programs installed.

You tell me: Am I better off setting up an on-site server? How much would that cost to add to my server cabinet?

I feel like I’m hitting the nail on the head with Azure but don’t know where to start.

If someone could point me in the right direction that would be very helpful and greatly appreciated.