Information systems and computer hardware represents a significant investment for the small company in South Africa. In this series of Blog posts we are going to investigate the alternatives and try and provide a road-map in the selection and implementation of these systems.

The idea for this series of Blog posts originated in my current assignment with a small ICT company in Cape Town. The brief was simple, please come and help us with our operational management, please start of by documenting our current processes and implement changes where necessary. Further to the original brief I also had to take into account the company’s simple philosophy that they were going to focus on their core business and outsource everything else.

This lead to identifying what tools would be used to document these processes and what tools was needed to support the rapid growth of this business into the future.  It was important to select tools that was web based as this companies operations spanned international borders and it was important to give all employees access to these systems.

What all this meant was that we needed to implement a Intranet web server accessible to all employees.  This then further prompted a investigation of their server and network infrastructure in order to make sure that everything was aligned.

Some of the questions that had to be answered in this space was where to host the Intranet server,  on-site at their head office or in a ISP data centre. At first look all indications was that we would host the server in a ISP’s data centre as their mail was already hosted with an ISP.

They were also running out of storage space on their file and print server with the server itself running to the end of support with the supplier.

The last area that we looked at was the Internet link to the head office. This was a single ADSL line that was sufficient in providing Internet access, but was lacking in terms of being a reliable and fast enough VPN link for employees accessing the office from the Internet,  as upload speeds was limited to 512 kbps  and the link did not have a static IP address.

We then went to market to get quotes on buying new servers, hosting the intranet server and upgrading the Internet to a link that would support their business needs.

With the quotes and relevant information at our disposal we then decided to upgrade the Internet link to a bonded solution with fixed IP addresses. Buy two new servers on which we would implement a virtualization layer before implementing the servers we needed to support business and host everything locally at their head office.

This post would have given you a good overview to the business needs of this small company and in the following blog posts we will discuss the implementation of all the systems to support their business.  These Blog entries will discuss the following topics.

• Network, server and virtulazation environment.
• Documentation tools.
• Customer Relationship Management tools.
• Business Support tools.

I hope you enjoyed this post, till next time.