Hardware essays

Hardware essays 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 e-commerce field. Latter on, they can work with the ISP to decide which services can be more effectively managed in-house. This will also give time to train personnel with the new technologies and hire or outsource IT support as needed. In the initial phase, ABC will purchase three Windows 2000 servers, switches, and lease a router from the ISP for each of the three sites. Additionally, Windows 2000 Professional workstations will be purchased for the users. The bull pen rooms will be reorganized with partitioning and modern lighting. The sales reps will be given hand phones issued from the Atlanta office. The CAD designers will rotate through the Atlanta office for onsite training of AutoCAD for ...