

I know this isn’t exactly what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend also looking into a VM OS such as proxmox or unraid (I’m running unraid)
They’ll let you create/destroy VM instances you can access remotely. So in theory, you can give everyone their own VM to use and access the files on the server.
However, unraid / proxmox may have performance issues running in a VM on a Mac mini…
I was thinking OP could give everyone their own VM to use as a workstation so they could access the files on the server easily, and/or run programs based on their work. When their coworkers leave, OP can easily destroy the VM and the resources would be automatically reallocated (depending on the servers configuration). With a physical device, the storage on that device is only allocated to that device and can’t be shared when it’s not in use
Me, personally? I have multiple VMs for different contexts: my teaching job (super clean, video sharing tools, presentation tools), gaming, media server (has scripts to download stuff off of YouTube), server management (just a regular Debian install), and a fuck around box (I just use it to try new OSs like Fedora, or try breaking OSs like deleting the system32 folder on windows)