Case Study

SCENARIO

ESSENCE OF THE CASE

Following are the essential elements in this case:

• The current environment does not provide efficient management or operation.

• The workstation computers will be replaced to allow an installation of Windows XP Professional.

• Remote Assistance can be used to remotely assist users as long as the computers on both ends of the connection are Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

Jeff's Jeep Tours is an Australian tour company that provides unique tours of the Australian continent . Jeff's has a central office that is located in Sydney with 20 other smaller remote offices located all over the country. Some of the remote offices have only three or four employees and no IT staff. The IT management responsibility for these offices is shared among all the IT staff in other locations. Jeff's network currently consists of a mixture of Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, and Windows 2000 Professional client computers with Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 domain controllers and member servers.

The CEO of Jeff's Jeep Tours, Jeff Johnson, has hired you as an outside consultant to plan and implement a solution for a new network that will allow for increased performance, security, and manageability. All workstations will be replaced with new Pentium 4 computers. No new servers will be purchased. The Sydney office uses an Active Directory domain with Windows 2000 Server domain controllers. You will be allowed to upgrade all domain controllers as required.

You propose a plan that upgrades all servers to Windows Server 2003 and installs Windows XP Professional on all client workstations. You further propose to raise the domain functional level to Windows Server 2003 and create Group Policies that provide Remote Assistance support for all remote offices that have no onsite IT personnel. You will create a top-level OU named Locations with individual OUs created inside the Locations OU for each remote site. Each client computer will be a member of its respective OU. All user accounts will also be placed in their respective OUs.

ANALYSIS

By installing Windows XP Professional on all client computers and placing all computer and user accounts in OUs for their location, you can easily create, configure, and implement Remote Assistance policies that will allow your IT staff to respond to user requests for assistance from any location.