04 Feb The Chief Information Officer

Assignment 1: Preparing for a Company-Wide Migration to Windows 8.1

Crescent Manufacturing Inc. (CMI) is a luxury leader in crafted and customized home furnishings. The corporate headquarters and a production facility are located in Texas, with additional manufacturing facilities located in Nebraska and Maryland.

There are 250 employees in the Texas location, 175 in Maryland, and 25 in Nebraska. All locations use Windows 7 as the primary client operating system. The systems at the Maryland location are over five (5) years old. CMI’s Information Technology (IT) department upgraded the computer systems with new hardware within the past year at all other company locations. These upgraded computer systems are capable of running Windows 8.1. CMI recently upgraded all of its servers to run Windows Server 2012 in an Active-Directory-based environment.

The Operations, Marketing, Administration, IT Support, and Finance departments are located in the Texas location. Nebraska is primarily a manufacturing location that is staffed by production line employees, a line supervisor, and a plant manager. The Maryland office also includes an operations component (i.e., production line employees, line supervisor, and plant manager), a small IT department, and the company’s human resources department.

The current IT support staff comprises a seasoned group of individuals that collectively have over ten (10) years of experience in network administration and working with Microsoft operating systems. Many of the IT staff have recently completed training on the Windows 8 operating system and are well-versed in supporting Windows Server 2008 and 2012. The remainder of the company’s employees has only a basic knowledge of Windows 7 and relies on the company’s help desk to solve a majority of its computer problems. CMI has a team of 50 salespeople who use laptops and tablets while working from their home offices. These employees, who travel extensively with their laptops, must have their systems secured in case of loss or theft. The laptops, purchased over five (5) years ago, run the Windows 7 operating system. The tablets, used only by a subset of the sales staff, are iPads running iOS 7.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is concerned about employees installing non-standard company applications downloaded from the Windows Store both while at work and when they have their devices at home. The CIO also wants to ensure that those persons on the IT staff are the only individuals authorized to update Windows Store apps. The CIO has an IT support staff of ten (10) employees and does not want to increase the number of applications that need to be supported via the company’s help desk. The help desk is currently staffed by three (3)