S
Suzanne Woo
Greetings!
We are a small company with about 30 computer users. Some of us (management,
customer support and administration) are heavy computer users, while a few
are only touching the computer to scan a barcode and wait until a certain
label is printed.
I have already created a sheet that shows who in our company is using the
computer for what purpose, and what kind of equipment we own. This gives me
a good picture what’s going on in our company.
We are a company doing online business, which means that every single
computer is connected to the Internet and nearly all of us have to access a
web application. We have our main office, a handful of remote workers, and
two small branches with not more than 5 computers each.
Apart from the web application (which runs through Internet explorer and is
hosted outside the office), most of our users need their computers for IMAP
Email, printing, MS Word, and MS Excel. Some of us have PGP, Acrobat
Professional, diverse file transfer and CD/DVD burning software, Image
Processing, HTML and a couple of specialized Windows packages (Accounting or
Programming).
In our main office, we currently have Windows based servers used as Active
Directory, Mail Server, File Server and Print Server. There is a total of
25 Windows workstations at the main office currently.
The two branch offices are completely separate and one has their own Active
Directory and network, while the other one has 6 peer-to-peer Windows 2000
PCs.
Our complete computer and network infrastructure has been built during the
years by ourselves, without real specialists. We are just a couple of heavy
computer and Internet users facing the need to add more, clean up, upgrade
licenses, increase network capacity, rent a bigger office, buy more PC’s,
replace old PC’s, and so on -- and all this frequently.
Because we are looking into expanding our company further in 2005 and plan
to hire about 10 new people, we will have to add equipment once more. The
equipment is not our only worry. The company reached a size where managing
documents, sharing tasks, workflows, communication and managing knowledge
became difficult to manage.
We do not have a system administrator, and we do not have the resources or
knowledge to properly plan and extend our network and “business platform”
further without professional help.
Unfortunate, we are also in a position where we cannot outsource due to the
confidentiality issues that come with our business, and simply because of
our geographical location. We would rather want to invest into our own
network engineer or network administrator, who comes with experience and
knows what we need, who can give us a hand and train our employees and
ourselves where needed, and who makes sure that the daily operation runs
smoothly and people have guidelines (backups, anti-virus) to follow and
understand them.
We are using IMAP Email as our primary means of internal and external
communication, and due to the missing system administrator (and personal
preferences of the business owners), we failed to integrate an Exchange
server combined with Outlook into our business. Every single employee,
including all the managers and supervisors, are manually remembering their
tasks, deadlines, schedules and such, and everything is done manually.
We would like to have a solution such as a combination of Exchange and
Outlook in place, mainly for calendar and tasks (communication itself works
actually pretty well with IMAP/MDaemon). This of course should work with
Outlook itself (in and outside the office through Firewall) or using the
Exchange web mail client (again, in and outside).
But the main thing we are looking for is some software that helps us to put
the complete workflow of our company into a database, helps us to assign
tasks, see all the departments, available resources, bottlenecks, and
dependencies.
We hope that MS Project, combined with a couple of other MS applications
(Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, whatever) could be helpful. Provided that we
find out what kind of person we need to hire to get all this up and running,
get some knowledge how to keep it running, and get training how to use it.
We have been avoiding this step for too many years, not willing to pay a
huge amount of money to Microsoft for such expensive applications, not
willing to accept the overhead of getting such applications installed and
customized, not willing to accept the security holes and risks that
apparently come with Microsoft products. We have reached the point where we
need a stable platform to work with, we need some help and hope to get it
through these Microsoft solutions.
After reading that entire long story here and by knowing that the persons
who wrote this are doing all of their project management and enterprise
resource management the old fashioned way (manually), do you have any
directions you can give us?
What kind of person are we looking for? By looking at some jobs web site, I
believe we are looking for a “System Engineer” and a “System Administrator”
(both in one person).
What kind of certificates does this person need? I’ve heard of something
like MCP, MCSE, MCSD, etc. What we need is a person who knows technically
how to get our servers and systems up and running, knows how these
applications work and what they are used for. Before getting to work, this
person needs to analyze not only the current IT infrastructure with us, but
also analyze some of our business logic and office/administration procedures
to understand our needs and how to implement the new systems best. Getting
things up and running and provide user guides and training for everyone is
only the tip of the iceberg.
What Microsoft products are we looking at here to manage our company
resources (especially workflows, tasks, schedules, dependencies, documents)
through our valuable Windows 2003 servers? Is our guess with MS Project a
shot into the right direction? Is Exchange is needed under any
circumstances? What else is there and we didn’t already mention? Visio?
What is your best guess for such an implementation to setup the systems and
get things up and running, and to train people and make them using it? The
company management is open-minded, technically talented, and everyone has
10+ years computer experience. The core-management comes from the
programming field, and all other employees have long-term MS Office and
Windows experience.
We are a small company with about 30 computer users. Some of us (management,
customer support and administration) are heavy computer users, while a few
are only touching the computer to scan a barcode and wait until a certain
label is printed.
I have already created a sheet that shows who in our company is using the
computer for what purpose, and what kind of equipment we own. This gives me
a good picture what’s going on in our company.
We are a company doing online business, which means that every single
computer is connected to the Internet and nearly all of us have to access a
web application. We have our main office, a handful of remote workers, and
two small branches with not more than 5 computers each.
Apart from the web application (which runs through Internet explorer and is
hosted outside the office), most of our users need their computers for IMAP
Email, printing, MS Word, and MS Excel. Some of us have PGP, Acrobat
Professional, diverse file transfer and CD/DVD burning software, Image
Processing, HTML and a couple of specialized Windows packages (Accounting or
Programming).
In our main office, we currently have Windows based servers used as Active
Directory, Mail Server, File Server and Print Server. There is a total of
25 Windows workstations at the main office currently.
The two branch offices are completely separate and one has their own Active
Directory and network, while the other one has 6 peer-to-peer Windows 2000
PCs.
Our complete computer and network infrastructure has been built during the
years by ourselves, without real specialists. We are just a couple of heavy
computer and Internet users facing the need to add more, clean up, upgrade
licenses, increase network capacity, rent a bigger office, buy more PC’s,
replace old PC’s, and so on -- and all this frequently.
Because we are looking into expanding our company further in 2005 and plan
to hire about 10 new people, we will have to add equipment once more. The
equipment is not our only worry. The company reached a size where managing
documents, sharing tasks, workflows, communication and managing knowledge
became difficult to manage.
We do not have a system administrator, and we do not have the resources or
knowledge to properly plan and extend our network and “business platform”
further without professional help.
Unfortunate, we are also in a position where we cannot outsource due to the
confidentiality issues that come with our business, and simply because of
our geographical location. We would rather want to invest into our own
network engineer or network administrator, who comes with experience and
knows what we need, who can give us a hand and train our employees and
ourselves where needed, and who makes sure that the daily operation runs
smoothly and people have guidelines (backups, anti-virus) to follow and
understand them.
We are using IMAP Email as our primary means of internal and external
communication, and due to the missing system administrator (and personal
preferences of the business owners), we failed to integrate an Exchange
server combined with Outlook into our business. Every single employee,
including all the managers and supervisors, are manually remembering their
tasks, deadlines, schedules and such, and everything is done manually.
We would like to have a solution such as a combination of Exchange and
Outlook in place, mainly for calendar and tasks (communication itself works
actually pretty well with IMAP/MDaemon). This of course should work with
Outlook itself (in and outside the office through Firewall) or using the
Exchange web mail client (again, in and outside).
But the main thing we are looking for is some software that helps us to put
the complete workflow of our company into a database, helps us to assign
tasks, see all the departments, available resources, bottlenecks, and
dependencies.
We hope that MS Project, combined with a couple of other MS applications
(Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, whatever) could be helpful. Provided that we
find out what kind of person we need to hire to get all this up and running,
get some knowledge how to keep it running, and get training how to use it.
We have been avoiding this step for too many years, not willing to pay a
huge amount of money to Microsoft for such expensive applications, not
willing to accept the overhead of getting such applications installed and
customized, not willing to accept the security holes and risks that
apparently come with Microsoft products. We have reached the point where we
need a stable platform to work with, we need some help and hope to get it
through these Microsoft solutions.
After reading that entire long story here and by knowing that the persons
who wrote this are doing all of their project management and enterprise
resource management the old fashioned way (manually), do you have any
directions you can give us?
What kind of person are we looking for? By looking at some jobs web site, I
believe we are looking for a “System Engineer” and a “System Administrator”
(both in one person).
What kind of certificates does this person need? I’ve heard of something
like MCP, MCSE, MCSD, etc. What we need is a person who knows technically
how to get our servers and systems up and running, knows how these
applications work and what they are used for. Before getting to work, this
person needs to analyze not only the current IT infrastructure with us, but
also analyze some of our business logic and office/administration procedures
to understand our needs and how to implement the new systems best. Getting
things up and running and provide user guides and training for everyone is
only the tip of the iceberg.
What Microsoft products are we looking at here to manage our company
resources (especially workflows, tasks, schedules, dependencies, documents)
through our valuable Windows 2003 servers? Is our guess with MS Project a
shot into the right direction? Is Exchange is needed under any
circumstances? What else is there and we didn’t already mention? Visio?
What is your best guess for such an implementation to setup the systems and
get things up and running, and to train people and make them using it? The
company management is open-minded, technically talented, and everyone has
10+ years computer experience. The core-management comes from the
programming field, and all other employees have long-term MS Office and
Windows experience.