You are the network administrator for Fabulous Foods, Inc. Fabulous foods manufactures frozen food products for distribution to various stores and restaurants throughout the United States. The company has three facilities located in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Seattle. Each location houses corporate offices and manufacturing facilities. The corporate headquarters is located in Chicago.

The Chicago office houses departmental offices for the Accounting, Corporate Administration, Human Resources, Information Technologies (IT), Marketing, Operations, Purchasing, Research, and Sales departments. Offices for Human Resources, Information Technologies, Operations and Sales departments are also located in Pittsburgh and Seattle.

The main IT office is in Chicago. All policy management and most network and user management is done in Chicago. A help desk and application support staff are located on all sites. The Operations department also has their own IT staff at each location to support custom applications.

You are tasked with developing a Windows 2000 migration plan for the company network

Network infrastructure:

The network servers are a mix of Windows NT 4.0 Servers and Windows 2000 member servers in a Windows NT 4.0 domain environment. The Master domain is located in Chicago and several resource domains are distributed throughout the company. Administrators in Chicago use Global groups in the Master domain to group users. At each site, local administrators use local groups in the resource domains to delegate access to local folders and printers. The local administrators can not administer users and groups in the Master domain.

Several UNIX based systems operate in the manufacturing areas. Users log into these UNIX computers through terminal emulation. Each location contains at least one UNIX based DNS server. The UNIX DNS servers share a separate DNS root from the Windows environment. The network will be upgraded to a Windows 2000 Domain environment.

Client computers currently use Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Computer hardware varies throughout the company. The oldest computers are Pentium 133 systems with 16MB of RAM and 1.6GB hard disk drives. Microsoft Office 97 is used for most document processing and productivity work. Some computers in the Operations Department may be used by more than one employee.

Pittsburgh and Seattle both have 128K connections to the Chicago office. The Chicago office has about 1400 computers, while Pittsburgh and Seattle have about 300 computers each. Most data is stored on servers in the Chicago office. The company currently has no connection to the Internet.

Company President:

In our competitive market, we need to stay on top of technology so we can stay on top of our competitors. Our current network structure does not allow us to do this. I want our customers to be able to access our network for product and ordering information. I want to integrate our network with our suppliers to minimize inventory costs.

We haven’t even been able to update our internal processes. We have no internal email for the company. Our orders come to us on paper, which causes delays in responding to customer needs, and errors occur in data entry.

I want an updated network plan, I want to bring customer orders online, and I want to make it easier for employees to share and find information from other departments throughout the organization.

IT Director:

We have dumped a lot of money and man-hours into this network, but it seems like we are always just catching up instead of leading the way.

With the current network, all account administration is performed here in Chicago. This takes up valuable administration time. Domain administration should happen here in the corporate level, while user maintenance tasks should be done at each location. The help desk personnel at each location should be able to update account information, or deal with lost passwords.

We have to get rid of the Windows 95 and Windows 98 computers in the network. They pose too much of a security risk, and we want more control over the user’s desktops.

Every cost associated with this project will be weighed against the benefits. We have no plans to upgrade our WAN links between locations. We will have to plan carefully to not saturate these lines.

Operations Manager:

The manufacturing facilities, IT department, and operations department is at work from 5:00 AM to 11:30 PM six days a week. The other departments run an eight-hour day, five days a week. Once this project is completed, we will rely heavily on the network. This means that all extra network traffic and maintenance should happen after midnight, and should be finished by 4:00 AM.

We have 7,500 employees in our company, and over 2,000 computers. Any downtime in production has a high cost. We need to minimize any downtime in this project as well as in future operations.

We have registered the FabulousFoods.com domain name for our website which is hosted by a third party hosting company.

After the migration, we will be implementing a custom application that will integrate our client management software with the Windows 2000 domain. Our vendor has told us that by integrating this application within the Schema of Active Directory, we can benefit from the scalability and control contact information replication.

Migration Goals:

Group policy goals:

Group Policy will be managed form Dallas for both company-wide policy and departmental policy. Initially, Group Policy will be designed to redirect folders, to define logon scripts that will be customized for each department at each location, to minimize logon time, to define the desktop settings, and to allow department-specific software to be made available. Security groups will not filter Group Policy objects (GPOs), with the exception that most Group Policy will not apply to technical support staff.

How many Windows 2000 domains will you have at the end of the Migration project?

What issues will be helped by Active Directory?

What steps would you take to upgrade this network to Active Directory?

What changed to network infrastructure and WAN connectivity need to be made?

What site design would be used in this implementation?

How would you schedule replication?