Hardware
ABC Construction Company is a construction firm specializing in custom homes and office plazas. It has a corporate office in Atlanta with field offices in Mobile and Jacksonville. To date, interaction between the offices has been minimal. Each office obtained their own supplies, designed their own blueprints and pursued their own customer leads. They had no presence on the Web. CAD design was done on older Sun Sparc 2 Workstations and accounting and personnel records were kept on Apollo 725 UNIX Workstations. All workstations have external tape backup. The sales reps and buyers use a common bull pen for contacting customers and suppliers. The administrative staff and sales reps use a few old Windows PCs for printing documents, forms, and customer database.Recently the owner attended a conference of similar construction companies and found ABC was in the Dark Ages. After studying similar business models, ABC began working with a well recommended Internet Service Provider. ABC does not have any IT personnel and decided to have the ISP provide most of the services through offsite support and onsite support only as needed. This will allow for the shortest and safest path for a company just starting into IT and
Management of the distributed databases will be done at the Atlanta office for control and security. The Sales reps are given Laptops and are able to synchronize files, folders, and email from within the field office. The CAD drawings have been migrated to the local CAD servers and accounting data has been migrated to the local Accounting servers. The Extranet will be protected from the outside by two firewalls at the Atlanta office. The CAD designers will rotate through the Atlanta office for onsite training of AutoCAD for Windows 2000 using dual displays. PHASE TWO:In this phase, servers at the ISP are set up to accommodate data warehousing using automated incremental backups nightly from the CAD and Accounting servers in Atlanta with full backup on Saturday night. At this point, the office spaces have been modified, the Intranet is functioning with each site having a CAD server, an accounting server and an exchange server with services for internet phone and Web cam. The ISP will install the workstations to the appropriate server and instruct the users on migration from the old UNIX workstations to the Windows 2000 data server. Outlook Express will be setup as reflecting the three sites as one with private and public group folders. This information is updated in real-time based on Activity-Based-Costing input by the sales reps. The Atlanta office will be the proxy for the other sites having access to the Internet. Floor plans and vertical drawings will be presented as thumb nails with links to JIF files. A strong infrastructure will allow the personnel to work as teams tackling projects instead of individuals. At the office, they are able to burn CDs with custom sets of drawings based on customer requests. The accounting and customer databases will also do the same.
Common topics in this essay:
Residential Commercial,
CAD Accounting,
ABC Special,
System NFS,
Express ISP,
Additionally Windows,
Suppliers VPN,
Latter ISP,
UNIX Workstations,
Provider ABC,
atlanta office,
sales reps,
windows 2000,
voice mail,
exchange server,
atlanta office cad,
bull pen,
migrated local,
fault tolerance,
web site,
partners suppliers,
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