OK, so where have I been for the last month?

The past month has been filled with many projects that are taking place at the office and a few new home projects. Among these include:

• Setting up a branch office infrastructure, complete with a wireless WAN backbone and a restructuring of office resources. And this was done on a budget. A very slim budget - as in $1600 for the wireless WAN hardware and installation labor and about $3600 in a new server for this branch office.
• Migrating to a SAN. Our engineering office was running off a combination of NAS devices totalling about 500GB. We were quickly filling up this space with the massive amount of expansion that we have been undergoing, so a new storage “scheme” was necessary. We ended up installing a HP SAN that will start at 2 TB and will grow in the next three/four years.
• Migrating to Exchange 2007. This is a still on-going process. We have been running Exchange 2003 from just after it was originally released and have been relatively happy with it. However, in January, our Exchange box basically “died” and we have been operating a somewhat precarious condition ever since while waiting for management to approve new hardware. We also felt that we should take this time and upgrade to Exchange 2007 to help improve our internal workflow as well as better support our fleet of Windows Mobile devices that have been deployed to our Assistant Project Managers and Project Managers. This has been an experience and I have learned much that I will post about in the future.
• Due to the branch office addition, we also needed to change our interoffice phone system to tie this branch office to our PBX. We ultimately installed a non-SIP based phone system that integrates into our Intertel telephone system (not my personal choice, though…)

All of this has contributed to many sleepless nights and many shifting deadlines. The entire timeframe for the branch office was a total of three weeks from first being told to the move in date (last Monday). I’m happy to say that the move went off with a minimum of interruptions with the exception of the telephone system which has been fraught with problems.

Things I learned:

• Get the PBX provider in the loop at the very beginning of the process. This was our ultimate “critical path” and we couldn’t get everything in place in the three week timeframe. Intertel told us 4 weeks and that is how long they took.
• Buy a real SSL certificate for Exchange 2007. This would have spared about ten to fifteen new grey hairs on my head.
• Budget more time early in the process for preparation. We were unable to do much in the first week and a half as we did not have access to the premises. However, we should have set up more of the hardware/software infrastructure earlier in the process instead of towards the end as we did.
• Make sure that any hardware that you need is ordered personally. Do not take the word of others that the equipment has been ordered.
• Read the instructions for the Wireless Bridge Kit. (my fault there…)

I am now going to try to relax a bit more and try to recover from my total of 70+ hours of overtime the past two weeks.  One positive - or negative, depending on your perspective - my birthday is next week.  I’m getting old.

Well, have a pleasant weekend and don’t work too hard.