Riordan Manufacturing Upgrade

Riordan Manufacturing is a privately held company with plant operations in Albany, Georgia; Pontiac, Michigan; Hangzhou, China. The Corporate Headquarters are located in San Jose, California. Riordan Manufacturing is a subsidiary of Riordan Industries. The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is Hugh McCauley and the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is Dale Edgel. The Company employs a work force of 550 people throughout the four locations.

Corporate Headquarters in San Jose, California has recognized a growing need to upgrade the network operating system. Riordan’s current operating system is Windows NT 4.0. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) Maria Trinh has asked the Manager of IT Services, Patricia Miller to assemble a team of IT Professionals to evaluate both Windows 2000 and 2003 as well as the LYNUX Operating System. Based on this study she is to make her recommendations as to what operating systems will serve Riordan Manufacturing best.

Purpose of Project

Riordan Manufacturing is currently utilizing the Windows NT 4.0 operating system. Our team is evaluating the different Windows Servers to determine which system is best suited for the company. Currently, the team favors the Windows Server 2003. This server provides many services and features that make a valid case to management for recommendation to upgrade. Our team will have to submit a proposal once we have solidified our decision. The Windows 2003 Server has shown to be the fastest, reliable and secure Windows Server. Windows Servers 2003 integrates many powerful applications that are important to businesses that can improve efficiency (Microsoft, 2002, p.1).

Areas of Business to be improved

§ Sharing Resources

1. Shared folders

2. Mapped drive is shared on the network by a file server or workstation

3. Print server

4. Software applications stored on server

§ Managing resources

1. Managing access to network resources

§ Internet

§ Printers

§ Files

§ Software

§ Security

1. File and folder protection

2. Account and network access passwords

3. File, folder and account auditing

4. Server access protection on a network

§ Scalability and compatibility

1. Ability for computer operating system to function on a range of computers from small to large.

2. Can start as small group and can be scaled to larger group

§ Reliability

1. Multitasking, the ability to run two or more programs at the same time

2. Multithreading, is the capability of programs written in 32-bit code to run several programs code blocks at the same time.

§ Disreputability

§ Fault Tolerance

1. Recovery from hard disk failures

2. Recovery from lost data in a file

3. Recovery from system configuration errors

4. Advanced warning about system and hardware problems

§ Internet integration and electronic commerce

1. Internet Information Services (IIS)

§ Intranet

§ Internet

Doing an upgrade of Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2003 will bring many improvements to our business. These improvements will be seen in the areas of sharing resources, managing resources, security, and scalability. While taking advantage of these improvements we will also be able to implement an Active Directory and Internet Information services.

Sharing resources such as implementing a Print Server would improve the cost of printing information. The cost improvement would come from the fact that we would no longer need printers directly connected to each user’s computer.

Managing access to network resources would also impact the cost of business. The company would be able to implement network