VPN with multiple offices

[Aaron Siegel]

Hello

I know this is a popular and probably discussed many times before. My problem 
is I am finding to much information and having trouble weeding through it 
all. 

I am an facilities engineer (not a network administrator) for a small firm 
that is in located multiple offices. We also work with many other small 
companies who will need temporary access to the network while working on 
larger projects.  In addition to this we would like to give remote access for 
our road warriors from anonymous networks.

For the our offices I believe a tunnel with esp that seems to be the is 
documented in the handbook and many other sites.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ipsec.html
http://www.daemonnews.org/200101/ipsec-howto.html
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bsdcon02/full_papers/schadow/schadow_html/

Does anyone have anyone have any suggestions on how to provide outside 
companies access to the network?  Most of these companies do not have 
computer administrators and have minimal computer skills.  

I am thinking of using PPTP to provide access to the outside offices and the 
road warriors.  Then secure the network using a server certificate (I am not 
sure what to call it).  The reference for this configuration was found at the 
site bellow.
http://www.sigsegv.cx/FreeBSD-WIN2K-IPSEC-HOWTO.html

I writing this in hope to hear other people experiences with seting up and 
managing simular configurations.   I would like to know if I am on the right 
track or there better tools for creating this configurations.

Thank you for your time

Aaron Siegel