Yes to both questions. You can use the Samba client to access resources on Windows machines and the Samba server to create shares that Windows machines can see.
If you are running Suse you probably have both packages installed. I found it easier to skip the GUI configuration utility and made my changes directly to /etc/smb.conf.
The process is to configure Samba actually pretty simple and, in my opinion, works faster and more reliably than Windows.
You can go to
http://www.samba.org for more information on how Samba works.
