Introduction

In the age of modern technologies, every company, being  either a small company or a transnational one, is striving to use the technologies to satisfy needs of its customers. This paper is devoted to the case study of Dooma-Flochies, Inc., the company that is looking for ways to better their performance and the speed of communication between company departments and all the employees. This paper is aimed to develop such ways of communicating, using modern technologies, which will satisfy needs of all those who work at the company.

The Company

The company that is going to modernize the system of communication among its employees is called Dooma-Flochies, Inc. and it is the only manufacturer of Dooma-Flochies. The headquarters of the company is situated in Podunk Road in Trumansburg, NY. Besides, the company has manufacturing facilities in Lake Ridge, NY, and has recently purchased the company This-N-That, that produced Thinga-Ma-Jigs, which made Dooma-Flochies the company-monopolist at this market.

The problem is that, even though the company Dooma-Flochies is the monopolist at the market, there is not any common system of communicating among employees. Before purchasing Lake Ridge, the territory taken by the company was not big that made it possible to use only one person, Hi Tek, to deliver mails and other messages between employees. However, the years passed and Hi was getting older that made it impossible to deliver fast all the information, needed by the employees.  Several years later, the bosses of Dooma-Flochies decided that the company should have one common system of communicating.

Requirements of the Company

Establishing a common communicating system pursues not only business goals, but also will help employees communicate faster both with each other and with the heads of different departments (there are eight departments in the company). All goals set by the company may be divided into three types:

-         Goals for the network system;
-         Goals for technical point;
-         Goals for bettering business performance.

Network goals mean those aims that are set in front of the network itself:

-    The developers of the future network should identify all hardware that will be used by the employees of the company as well as hardware that will be used for delivering messages. Besides, the company should receive from the developers the list that will include names of models of hardware, its cost, specification and the plan where is to place those models.
-     The list, given by the developers to the bosses of the company Dooma-Flochies, should include the names and models of routers, servers, switches and NIC cards needed. If a developer needs some specific kind of hardware, the reasons for it should be explained in the same list.
-      The network created should meet all the requirements and fulfill them
-   The suitable addressing scheme should be developed; besides it should include CIDR notations and the explanations why this very scheme was used. The explanation should be detailed, providing such data as number of hosts that is possible for this range, the subnet and the broadcast addresses as well as the routing protocol for the network.

The business goals were the following:

-         The first business goal that is set for the network is that a customer is able to interact with the company only by using their web site. The customer should be able to place orders for the company products; these orders should be suitable processed and the customer should be given an appropriate date of completion of the order (of the delivery).  
-         All employees that are placing the order of the customer should be able to see information about the order details.
-         The access should be based on the need. For example, employees should be allowed to get all the information about orders; the online payment system should have secure connection; all customers should have access to contact information (about us); the connection should be persistent while the customer is making an order.
-         The company has several facilities; those in Dime Box have administrative buildings. However, all orders should be sent to the main office in Trumansbur.
-         Managers from all facilities and all departments should  secure   Management needs for remote access.
-      Those who are involved in delivering or packing an order, should have automated notifications; besides all notifications should be sent to the president to make sure that all orders are processing and to be aware of their current status. When there are too many orders, the president of the company should receive not all order notifications but only the messages of critical things, for example, the status of the inventory.
-         Online availability is critical for the President of the company, because he is planning to move the company into world wide online based sales.

Technical requirements:

-        The web site as well as the access to the network should be available all the time, i.e., for twenty-four hours, seven days a week.
-         The critical mission is the quality of the performance.
-         The network should have a remote management
-         The security policy should be developed
-        Security measures should be appropriate and put in place. The developers of the network should provide the bosses of the company with the explanation how to restrict access and grant it.

The requirements, the goals set by the company to the developers, prove that the company is seeking for the best developers of the network because it needs its customers to feel secure while ordering and sure that they will receive their order. The requirements listed below are those that developers were provided with. However, the company was pursuing other goals that were not mentioned in any of the lists. For example, there are the requirements that are set in front of the connection system. It is known that the company has three sites that are geographically dispersed: the headquarters of the company is located in Trumansburg, NY; the company owns  manufacturing facilities in Lake Ridge, NY and the branch office in Dime Box, Texas. All the sites should be connected to ensure fast communication and interaction between them. Besides, the president of the company should be aware of everything that is happening in the company. That is why there should be connectivity to the president’s winter and summer homes. Those who are responsible for sales should also have the opportunity to access the inner company network.

The idea is that to provide the WAN connectivity being needed by the company will be provided by MPLS VPN with the help of local providers; the redundancy of the connection will be provided by the use of  Cisco VPN endpoint that will be used in head quarters of the company. This will help to connect both sites as well as secure connection from the outer networks. The physical performance of the network will be a fiber connection between the Warehouse and the Datacenter of the company; however, in the headquarters site the connection will be performed using the tube that will go beneath the railway tracks. The point is that the company owns train tracks, which makes it possible to build the tube under it.

The other goal that is pursued by the company while establishing a modern network connection is to meet all the e-commerce requirements. The president of the company is willing to transit the company into the international level of the commerce, which means that online sales of the company products will be performed all over the world. This means that the web site of the company should be available all the time in all corners of the world; besides, a customer should have access to his or her own profile where he or she can see the current status of the order, its tracking and when it will be delivered; moreover, the online payment system should be created and the catalog should be always available. The customer should see all the details of his or her order, for example, Production, Shipping, Sales and Finance. The module of the e-commerce will be placed in the DMZ of the whole network and will be connected to the internal server. The internal server will host the Microsoft Dynamic ERP system, which will provide all the necessary functions of the managing all the resources and inventory of the company. Moreover, this system will give the possibility to use the secure VPN connection to the servers of such financial companies as Visa, MasterCard and American Express, which will ensure the security of payment system performing better connection between headquarters, Lake Ridge and Dime Box

The company is rather big nowadays and when purchasing Dime Box it became difficult to perform good interaction among all the warehouses, administration offices, managers, headquarter and other employees. That is why one of the first goals to achieve was to establish a good system of communication so that several managers will be able to discuss something at the same time. The best solution was to establish the system of IP telephony and video conferencing. As it was mentioned above, the company is relatively big nowadays; that is why for the IP telephony the Cisco Call Manager will be used with the license for seven hundred telephones. The connection will be performed using SIP trunks, which will help to avoid the Voice gateway with T1 cards.  Such a call manager will provide signaling to 360 IP telephones that are located in the headquarters; whereas the other sites will receive signaling from the Cisco 2951 routers with SRST that will be located in their offices and warehouses. The video conferencing will not be performed on this stage of modernization of the company because the company is not capable of financing it. However, the system will be developed and presented to the president of the company as a project for the nearest future.

One of the requirements of the company was the opportunity of the managers to perform remote control. To achieve this, the company needs to establish a contact center as well as the ticket management and escalation solution. There are two ways of performing escalation solutions: Queue based escalation solutions and SLA based escalation solutions. Queue based escalation solutions are good when a company receives requests that have high priority from a customer that needs to be answered fast and in a consistent manner. When the queue escalation is set, it is important to remember that all tickets will be affected by escalation rules. The other type of escalation is the SLA (Service Level Agreement) escalation. This type of escalation is based on the conjunction with the service, which means the direct conjunction with the customer. Dooma-Flochies will have the SLA escalation, which will help the company to make monthly profit out of it. All the equipment that is used for network connection will register with a local provider, who will be in charge for troubleshooting the network and providing the company with different services, such as adding new telephone numbers and users to the Active Directory. However, this option is also only the project nowadays because it is very expensive for the company to establish such a system.

IP System

One of the main requirements of the company was to establish the IP scheme of the inner network. The IP system being proposed was designed  to satisfy not only needs of the present company but also the developers have also taken into account that the company will grow and the network system will grow as well. That is why it was proposed that every department would have VLAN, which were also assigned for the departments in Lake Ridge that do not exist nowadays. The type B of private IP address with VSLM will be used to provide network security from outer intrusions. Besides, the company will have its own DHCP server which will ease the changing of the subnet mask when the company grows.

In headquarters the IP System will be the following:

Lake Ridge is a small department; that is why the network will not be overloaded. The table for the Lake Ridge is:

Dime Box is the newest department of the company; however, it is very important for the developing of the company.

The problem was that although Dime Box was the newest department, it has already become very important. It was essential for the network developers to solve the problem of making the network there rather big and fast. The problem in Lake Ridge was that this department contained very few important offices but the bosses of the company plan to expand this department. That is why the designers of the network decided to make a network that would have the opportunity to expand and serve for the amount of people that is working nowadays in the headquarters offices.

Routing Protocols

In the tables above one may see that every department will have the Wi-Fi network. It was very important to choose routing protocol that will meet customer’s needs as well as fit those requirements that were given to the network designers. Routing protocols is the way how routers communicate with each other. There are some types of routing protocols and all of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Three major classes of routing protocols are:

-         Interior gateway routing via state routing protocols, such as IS-IS  or OSPF;
-         Interior gateway routing via distance vector or path vector protocols, for example, IGRP or EIGRP;
-         External gateway routing (BGP)
For the company the network designers decided to use OSPF routing protocol, because it is rather cheap; however, it is more difficult to use this protocols. Moreover according to Bryant (n.d.), to the advantages of OSPF routing protocol belong:
-         “Compared to RIP, the OSPF protocol has no such limitation put over it.
-         Since OSPF was designed to handle larger networks, OSPF protocol has the ability to increase or reduce the IP packets.
-         The OSPF run network is first broken into 18 pieces or classes.
-         the OSPF protocol is loop-free and provides the fastest address.
-         the OSPF coverage diameter is wider compared to the diameter of the RIP
-         Whenever changes are made in the routing tables, updated values are transferred” (Bryant, n.d.)