2006: A Great Year for Windows IT Innovation

HONORABLE MENTION
Brent Rickels
Vice President,
First National Bank of Bosque County,
Valley Mills, Texas

Email: brent@fnbbosque.com

NT Network Overhaul
In 2005, senior management of First National Bank of Bosque County approved retiring the bank's legacy Windows NT Server 4.0 network and moving to Windows 2003 and XP. Like most small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), the community bank had a lean IT budget and limited IT staff. Vice President of Operations Brent Rickels explains his goals for the upgrade: "I wanted a setup that would be secure, offer high performance and reliability, and be easy to manage. I said, 'let's scrap everything, buy new hardware and software, and do this right.' But we don't have a huge IT budget, so every dollar spent needed to be as productive as possible."

Brent's plan was to use a combination of offthe-shelf software, built-in Windows tools, and infrastructure design to accomplish these goals. He started by developing a domain blueprint. Brent created two domains: a root domain that contains two domain controllers (DCs) in different locations for redundancy, has only two user accounts, and is used for routine maintenance; and the bank's primary domain, which has four DCs, each of which also acts as a DNS server for the bank's internal network.

Brent was especially mindful of security. "Our public Web server and mail server are located in offsite data centers with high security and a full-time IT staff," says Brent. The bank actually uses two mail servers—an external POP3 server that uses multiple antivirus engines and spam filters, and an internal Exchange 2003 system—and gives only certain employees public email addresses.

Brent employs a Cisco Systems firewall at the gateway and Windows Firewall on local PCs and uses Surf Control's Web filter product to control users' Internet access. To protect against malware, the bank installed SecureWave's Sanctuary application control software, which creates a database of all bank-approved software, monitors all software that tries to run, and prevents unapproved software from being executed.

The bank makes heavy use of Group Policy in combination with ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority to monitor computers for activity and perform automatic shutdowns. Brent also runs Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer twice a year and uses DFS for file replication to redundant servers.

Brent implemented the upgrade in stages and was amazed at how smoothly it went. Users and management are happy because security is tighter and access to system resources is quicker. And the new system frees Brent from many administrative tasks he formerly performed. "I now spend a lot less time managing our network, answering questions, and configuring PCs. Remote control alone has saved me countless hours."

HONORABLE MENTION
Ben Schorr
CEO,
Roland Schorr & Tower,
Honolulu, Hawaii

Email: bens@rolandschorr.com

OneNote Collaboration Tool
Field employees for technology consultant Roland Schorr & Tower needed a way to share information to aid in troubleshooting and onsite maintenance for clients. "Because different engineers have different specialties and skill sets, frequently two or more engineers needed to collaborate on a problem," says Ben Schorr, CEO. Ben opted to use Microsoft Office OneNote 2007. "We've been beta testing Office 2007 since last year, and I'm a OneNote MVP, so it was a good choice for us," says Ben.

Ben wanted a system that would let engineers document their client visits and easily and quickly search all documentation when researching solutions to clients' technical problems. "We set up a shared notebook in OneNote on a server drive and had our field people open that folder on their tablet PCs," he says. OneNote synchronizes a copy of the server folder to the engineer's local hard drive. The notebook contains a section for each client, which includes a page for each device the client has and pages for general information, billing notes, open problems, and other documents. Every change made to a page in the local shared folder is synchronized to the main folder on the server the next time the tablet PC connects to the server.

"With this system we have a large, dynamic, fully searchable collection of notes on each client and their environment," says Ben. "We can drag and drop Web content [onto a page] or grab screen shots of error messages or configuration screens and save those right in the client notes. If we have a meeting or phone call with the client or a vendor, we can even record the audio so that it's accessible to our entire group." The solution has enabled knowledge sharing among employees and provided better documentation for billing. "I can't imagine any project we've ever done that beats this one in terms of ROI," he says.

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