Chapter Scenario: Wide World Importers

This chapter will examine the decisions you have to make for an imaginary company called Wide World Importers. Wide World Importers is a North American corporation with distribution centers and service centers across the continent.

The Existing Network

Distribution centers are located in Washington, D.C., Vancouver, Toronto, Portland, Dallas, and Mexico City. Regional offices are located at each distribution center and each center has roughly 500 users. At the corporate head office in Washington, 2000 user accounts need to be created.

There are many service centers across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. At each one, there are 10 or fewer computers that must be connected back to the nearest distribution center for ordering purposes. The service centers don't have local Information Technology (IT) staff.

All the distribution centers are linked to the corporate head office with T3 connections. Each service center is connected to the nearest distribution center using Fractional T1 lines with 256 K of available bandwidth.

User Account Management

The IT department of Wide World Importers wants to maintain control of the creation of user accounts from the head office in Washington. But it will allow local administrators at each distribution center to manage existing user accounts.

Due to the nature of its work, the Engineering department wants to implement more rigorous password requirements than the rest of the company. While the rest of the organization wants six characters as the minimum password length, the Engineering department requires eight characters. The head of the Engineering IT department, Kim Abercrombie, will manage the Engineering accounts.

Application Support

Wide World Importers has standardized on the Microsoft suite of applications for both the desktop and the server platform. With the rollout of Windows 2000, Wide World Importers wants to deploy Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server for e-mail and Microsoft Office 2000 as the corporate desktop standard application suite.

Wide World Importers uses the Office 2000 suite of applications. Office 2000 must be available to all users in the organization so that all employees can use the applications. In addition, the accounting department employees need to have the custom accounting software available. The custom accounting software implements Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages for the deployment of software.

Client Desktops

All client desktops at the distribution centers need to be upgraded so that Windows 2000 Professional can become the corporate desktop standard. The plan is to eventually upgrade the client desktops at the service centers to Windows 2000 in the next two calendar years, but at first several service centers will use Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT 4.0 Workstation in addition to Windows 2000 Professional.

Security Templates

To ensure that all desktop and server software is configured with the required security settings, Wide World Importers wants to deploy standardized security settings using Windows 2000 Group Policy. All workstations will be configured with the Basic Workstation template (Basicwk.inf). Servers (non-domain controllers) will be configured with the Basicsv.inf, and domain controllers (DCs) will be configured with the Basicdc.inf template.

Windows 2000 Security Goals

Wide World Importers is planning to migrate to Windows 2000 and wants to ensure that security is maintained throughout its entire network. The company wants to maintain the simplest Active Directory design that will meet its business requirements.