Accessing External Hard Drive

I have an external hard drive that is connected to a laptop. I want to be able to view/access the files on that hard drive w/o physically having to be at the laptop it is connected to. Is my best bet for this to just set the drive as "shared" on my network so I can see the files from any computer connected to the network?


EDIT ---
2 machines are Win 7, 3 are Windows 8, we are behind different domains and connected to different workgroups, which I am sure throws a big wrench into things.