You have obtained a contract position at a small advertising company called ABC Corp.. Your contract responsibilities are to help them update their IT resources. The company originally started with two partners who produced print flyers for local businesses. Their list of customers has greatly expanded, and their customers are demanding more interactive advertising media, including video presentations. The partners recognize the business potential in this new market and have hired you to review their existing IT resources and produce a proposal that allows the company to take advantage of this new market. The partners have stated that if the proposal meets their requirements, they may hire you full-time to implement and manage these new resources.

Part 1: Gather information and determine customer requirements.

You now have an idea of the scope of the project that you have undertaken, but do not have all of the information required to proceed. The first step in any IT project is to gather information. What is really required? What restrictions, if any, are there in equipment and resource selection? What resources are currently in place? The more information that you gather at the beginning of any project, the better.

A good way to start the information gathering process is to conduct interviews with the key individuals within the company, who are usually divided into three main groups: managers, end users, and IT support. Each group can provide valuable information.

Managers - Managers can answer questions regarding timing, expectations, and future plans. Any IT solution must take into account the plans that the company may have for growth, either in the number of employees or the technology being deployed. Managers can also provide you with information regarding company policies that may affect the proposed solution. Policies could include such things as access, security, and privacy requirements. The following information is normally gathered from managers:

? Budget (n/a)

? Requirements and expectations

? Restrictions

? Staffing

? Future growth

End users - End users are the people directly impacted by the solution you design. While managers are also end users, their requirements may differ drastically from the majority of the employees. It is important to talk to as many employees from as many departments or work areas as possible, to determine their requirements. It is also important to determine the actual, rather than perceived, requirements. From a customer service perspective, including employees in the initial discussions improves their buy-in and acceptance of the final solution. The following information is normally gathered from end users:

? Requirements and expectations

? Current perceived performance of the equipment

? Applications used

? Work patterns

IT department - Most small businesses do not have an IT department and responsibilities may fall on one or more individuals, depending on their job role and expertise. Larger businesses may have a separate IT department. Those individuals who handle the IT can provide you with more technical information. For example, an end user may complain that an existing network has become slow, but an IT person can provide the technical information to determine if performance has been degraded. The following information is normally gathered from IT:

? Applications used

? Work patterns

? Hardware resources

? Network infrastructure (physical and logical topology)

? Network performance and issues

Part 2: Gather System Requirements.

ABC Corp. has provided a written summary containing a floor plan, and a verbal interview with a company manager. Gather as much information as possible from these two sources to help you plan a technical solution for ABC Corp..

Step 1: Review available information.

ABC Corp. Information

Because ABC Corp. is a small business, it has no IT department. Everyone has taken care of their own resources. If they could not fix the problem, they would call in an outside service technician. With the planned expansion, the office will be reorganized, and additional employees will be hired to handle the new video production work. The company will have the following employees:

Administrative Manager - Duties include scheduling work, hiring and managing part-time workers, weekly payroll, and project tracking. The administrative manager uses spreadsheet and database software and must be able to use email provided by the ISP.

Film and Graphics Production Editor (one of the partners) - Requires special editing software that uses very high-resolution graphics and requires at least 16 GB of memory to run effectively. The software also interfaces with a video capture interface board that uses PCIex16 slot in the computer. This specialized software only works in a Windows 10 environment. It is important that the computer purchased for this position supports high-resolution video and has enough memory to enable the editor to work quickly. The production editor produces the final copies of the films and works within very tight deadlines. The editor must also be able to use email provided by the ISP.

Film Crew - The other six employees are mobile workers, consisting of two production assistants, two camera people, a production manager (one of the partners), and a film director. They are in the office an average of two days per week. The rest of the time is spent either at customer sites or on film locations.

Because all of the mobile workers are required to have access to email and production schedules, both at the office and while on location, it is important for them to be able to connect to the main office from anywhere. They have no special software requirements, but they do need a large hard drive to store the film files while they are working on them. The mobile workers must work at various locations and may not always be able to plug into a data port. It is important that they are able to connect to the internal network wirelessly.

Because of the sensitive nature of some of the documents and records required by the administrative manager, a private color laser printer must be installed in the manager's office. A combination copier/printer and high-resolution scanner must also be purchased and shared among all employees. N/A

For the purposes of training and compatibility, all of the computers should use the same operating system and applications, if possible. N/A

No budget has yet been established for the completion of this project. The company is moving into this new line of business in order to boost their revenue, so it is important that the project be completed with the lowest possible expenditures. N/A

ABC Office Floor Plan

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Use MATLAB to answer the following question. Include screenshot of your codes. Letx audio be a 20,000 sample-long row vector representing 2.5 sec of an audio signal sampled at 8 kHz. A simple data compression algorithm can be implemented by setting all elements of the data array x_audio with magnitude values below a threshold to zero. Note: The actual compression algorithm will code the zero-valued samples more efficiently thus achieving a certain degree of compression. In this exercise, however, we only want to investigate the compressibility of the data array x_audio as measured by the number of samples with magnitude values below the threshold. Write such a data compression algorithm. You may devise a simple method of counting the number of elements of data array that are set to zero. Use MATLAB to answer the following question. Include screenshot of your codes. Letx audio be a 20,000 sample-long row vector representing 2.5 sec of an audio signal sampled at 8 kHz. A simple data compression algorithm can be implemented by setting all elements of the data array x_audio with magnitude values below a threshold to zero. Note: The actual compression algorithm will code the zero-valued samples more efficiently thus achieving a certain degree of compression. In this exercise, however, we only want to investigate the compressibility of the data array x_audio as measured by the number of samples with magnitude values below the threshold. Write such a data compression algorithm. You may devise a simple method of counting the number of elements of data array that are set to zero.