Samba is required to communicate with any Window's shares and
vice-versa. It has the protocols that allow Linux and Windows to talk
to each other. I suggest installing Webmin which can help make things
easier to administer.

You don't need to have a fat32 partition in order to share files and
folders with Samba. Once a folder is shared with Samba (with full
permissions) you can read and write to any folder on your linux box.