Stanton Northwest

Stanton Northwest is a rapidly expanding real-estate development and property management firm based out of Kirkland, Washington with developments throughout the Puget Sound area.

A privately held company, until recently Stanton had been managed out of the basement of the home of its founder, Brian Housley. With a new management team coming on board, business rapidly growing, and the prospect of a move to new office space and the addition of a number of new employees, IMS was brought in to help recommend a set of strategic solutions for establishing a long-term, low-maintenance, low-hassle technology infrastructure to support the company's expanding operations.

Stanton's priorities were on providing simple, bullet-proof technology to employees dealing primarily with intellectual property and administrative functions. Office staff had basic requirements for e-mail, word-processing, spreadsheet, communications, and financial software. Anders Kruus, CFO and lead on the project, had a clear vision for the information system--that they would be safe, robust, and easily replaceable. Establishing the baseline for this system coinciding with the company move to new office space would put the company infrastructure on a solid foundation for future growth, with maximum flexibility and minimal legacy friction. Small businesses, faced with unpredictable avenues of growth, frequently suffer from lock-in to their original technology infrastructure, which is typically unplanned and ad hoc. Kruus hoped to avoid this by putting together a system at Stanton that would avoid potential traps in proprietary technologies which might prevent future adaptations to unforseen challenges or unexpected opportunities.

Indigo Moon Systems, investing only a few billable hours in the project, produced a complete recommendations report based on those principles with strong, specific guidance for implementation. Our conclusion was that a system could be built and outsourced such that extensive consulting time need not be spent either implementing or supporting it, and that Stanton staff could arrange or install most of the necessary technology without the expense of outside consultants. Further, the system would avoid expensive hardware or software purchases up-front, instead relying primarily on service-oriented solutions which could be dropped or adapted later without significant loss. Among the report recommendations were:

• Outsource electronic mail service to an off-site Application Service Provider, to provide the full functionality and performance of Microsoft's Exchange mail server (designed to work with the Outlook mail and calendaring software the company preferred) without any of the internal support or maintenance requirements.
• Obtain reliable, business-class Internet service from a local Internet Service Provider with a strong customer service reputation. Since much of the design called for outsourced application services, a solid Internet connection was to be a base requirement to achieve other goals.
• Standardize the hardware platform with products from a limited number of vendors with full warranty support. This would enable Stanton to refer hardware problems to the original equipment vendor in almost every case, without the necessity of third-party onsite support, and reduce discrepancies in coverage while also normalizing procedures for obtaining support.
• Install wireless internet access for the open-plan office space, with wireless print servers for shared print service with maximum flexibility for positioning and re-positioning printer stations. Since the office layout was new and more hiring could be expected over the foreseeable future, printer positioning could not be finalized and locked in during the initial planning--having the printers disconnected from both specific workstations and from the wired network would allow easy relocation without the expense of additional machines.
• Off-site, Internet-based backup or primary file storage--the preferred solution would be to store all corporate files off-site, obviating any need for an on-site file server while retaining the efficiency and coordination of centralized file storage.

Ultimately, Stanton chose to adopt our recommendations for off-site mail hosting, backup, and wireless network design. Rather than using their own staff, they chose to bring IMS in to perform the installation and configuration. Stanton also chose to use an on-site file server, for reasons of security and concern over file size and response in some applications, but continues to investigate and test off-site storage solutions.

The office space the company was moving to was professionally wired and a designated location in a back office selected for installing networking hardware. IMS procured and installed the necessary switches and wireless devices for the LAN*. Stanton arranged for the installation of business class DSL from the recommended vendor, but IMS stayed in contact with both parties through the installation process to avoid coordination timing issues.

A Dlink* DI624 was selected as the wireless access point and firewall. Although inexpensive, the Dlink had the required feature set, good web-management features (important for keeping future maintenance simple and in-house), and a reliable track record. For the wireless print servers, IMS selected Hewlett-Packard's* ew2400, compatible with the DI624.

For the on-site file server, instead of procuring expensive new hardware IMS was able to repurpose an older Stanton PC by installing larger, redundant hard drives and a solid, reliable, and low-maintenance Linux distribution (Debian) optimized for file services with Samba. Only the most rudimentary of security was installed to keep password and file access hassles to a minimum; since the server sits entirely behind the firewall and exposes only the ports necessary for SMB* file-sharing, the only real purpose of authentication is for internal file management.

To enable staff to handle the on-going maintenance tasks associated with user and file share management, Webmin* was also installed on the server and credentials provided to a single designated manager for access. Using the simple, web-based interface, new user accounts can be added without any external consulting costs, and other common tasks such as password resets, adding new file shares, or changing access security can all be handled immediately by Stanton staff.

To provide off-site backup with low-overhead and maintenance, IMS selected iBackup. The Internet based backup service was selected because of its full compatibility with Linux and excellent track record of reliability. Also fully compatible with Windows and Macintosh systems, iBackup provided flexibility in future backup strategies should the company require a transition at any point to another office server system. iBackup also filled a secondary goal of providing on-line file access, either by web or WebDAV interface--the files stored in their system could be made available at any future date to mobile employees, or inside the office, completely obviating the need for the on-site file server.

Mail2Web was chosen as the outsourced Exchange ASP. Mail2web provides multiple means of accessing e-mail accounts including RDP over HTTP and Outlook Web Access (OWA), and provides all the same functionality of an on-site Exchange server, including contact management, calendaring, and mobile device synchronization.

Installation of all systems was relatively straightforward. Some issues were encountered with the wireless security mechanisms--the HP wireless print servers were incompatible with the WPA* security protocol used by the DI624--but WEP* security proved to be an acceptably secure alternative and allowed full function of the print servers. Aside from that, predictably, most issues were encountered in configuring the file server, the most complex mechanism of the on-site installation. Several configuration problems cropped up in user account configuration, but work-arounds were quickly found, the most important of which allowed multi-user access to Quickbooks Pro 2006 files on the server--Quickbooks using, out of the box, a file locking system generally incompatible with Linux file security mechanisms.

With those issues addressed, Stanton was up and running with all users. Mobile workers, a substantial percentage of Stanton's workforce, had their laptops configured to automatically synchronize their files with those on the server whenever connected to the local network. Complete backups from the server to iBackup also run nightly, and using the iBackup web interface, remote users have another method of access to corporate files even should their laptop be unavailable or disconnected from the network for an extended period.

Stanton now has a corporate network able to support all required functions, and able to easily adapt at low or no cost to any number of staffing or usage scenarios. The multiple approaches to providing service--file access via the web or individual PC; network connection by wire or wireless; e-mail via Outlook or Outlook Web Access--allows easy workaround to any issues with any particular technology. The emphasis on outsourced services reduces the importance of any individual PC or laptop and makes failures as easy to fix as simply switching to another computer. Further, the use of outsourced services makes transition to a new service--say, to replace Mail2Web's Exchange service with a Google Mail solution--as easy as making a phone call, rather than an expensive internal project with software and hardware changes. The emphasis on minimal interference and easy, web-based maintenance means that nearly everything that might go wrong with the systems can be dealt with internally by Stanton staff, rather than continued visits from expensive consultants.