GoodSuff Inc. started as a retail store in downtown Bellevue in 1980. By 1995 the company had grown to have 6 stores scattered throughout the Seattle area. GoodStuff Inc. established a retail presence on the web in 1998, goodstuffwa.com, which has been maintained and modernized over the years. Currently about 40% of GoodStuff Inc’s business is done on-line.
The GoodStuff Inc. technology department is responsible for supporting the technology of GoodStuff Inc. Currently the department has 8 staff members lead by the Director of IT, Fred Fredman. Mr. Fredman was formerly a programmer with the company, but moved into the current position when the previous director, Roger Notable, resigned following the failure of a planned upgrade to the company’s Point of Sale (PoS) systems last year.
The other employees include two programmers, Bob Thebuilder, and Freddy Makego.; two network and system administrators, Billy McGiever and Mary Hadalamb; a web designer, Lacy Frillystuff, a systems analyst, Joe Knowsall; and an administrative assistant, Tom Thumb.
The company website is built using Active Server pages with C#. The site uses an MSSQL database to store the items for sale and their descriptions. The site is hosted on two Windows Server 2007 computers running IIS. The database is on a third server. In addition, there is a development machine which is used for designing and testing updates to the website.
The site is hosted in-house in a “server room” which used to be a closet.
The company is connected to the Internet via DSL. Each of the retail sites also has an Internet connection which is used to report sales data from the POS systems to the company main server. The company offices are located on the second floor above the Bellevue retail space. There is a Cisco PIX 501 firewall at each Internet connection. All systems in a location are on the same segment which was configured using the default of 192.168.0.0.
As a result of the failure, the company is continuing to use the older PoS system which was purchased in the 1990’s and runs on A/S400’s located in each store, with a master server in the Bellevue location. All credit card transactions are processed directly from each retail site, with loose coupling to the PoS system where the transaction code is transferred from the credit card terminal. This has proven problematic at times as the transaction codes reported by the PoS system do not always match the monthly report received from the merchant services company.
The company runs an exchange server for email. This is hosted on a single Windows 2007 server. Access from the remote stores is done via the exchange web client.
In addition to the website and PoS system, the IT department has a server which supports the companies installation of a Great Plains accounting system. This system has not been upgraded since 2001. The accounting department is hesitant to update it because they are satisfied with the performance of the system and feel that the stress of a change of system will be too great.
There are 50 pc users in the company, all but 5 of these users are in the main location. The others are the managers at the 5 other stores. Most users have computers purchased in the last three years and all are running Windows 7. 10 of the users have laptops, the others are all desktop users. There are three WiFi nodes in the corporate offices used to support the users and personal devices.
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