Please provide an answer to Case Study Question 1 for Chapter 3 of Digital Business Networks.

You have asked Karla, the L.A. office LAN administrator, for help in your analysis. However, Karla has told you that she is very busy and not able to provide you with much support. She also indicates that there is little written documentation as to how the various offices are set up. Following is her brief description of the L.A. office. Later you will visit the Chicago and New York offices to determine how they are configured. For now, Karla tells you they have a similar, though smaller, set-up: Chicago has 10 computers and New York has 15. The corporate office in Los Angeles is the oldest. It has 24 computers; 19 of them have licensed versions of Windows Vista and the 5 newest machines have licensed versions of Windows 7 Workstation. Karla has configured the computers to run as a peer-to-peer network, so depending on the particular computer it may function as either a server or a client. Karla admits that it has become complicated for her to keep all the machines current with the various user privileges that are shared across the network. For example, there are three laser printers, each connected to a separate computer. Fifteen other machines have been set up to share these printers, so there are 18 machines with the right to use the printers. The other 6 computers also need to be configured for printer sharing. All the computers have various data, files, and resources that are shared across the network. All computers have licensed copies of Microsoft Officebut different versions. Again, Karla isnt clear as to which versions are on which machines. Also, individual users have installed many of their own programs on their local computers. The resources (data, files, software) have not been documented in writing as to what is installed where or whether everything is correctly licensed. Karla simply knows where things are.

1. Interpersonal relations can be an important factor in whether you can successfully do your job or not. How would you describe the situation regarding Karla? How do you plan to proceed in working with her? It can be difficult to work with users who are accustomed to running their own computersinstalling what they want when they want on their local machines. How do you plan to address this? Is this a problem? If so, why?