What is your opinion on how long this should take

[Anonymous]

Fellow Tech’s I need your help. I need your opinion for a kind of poll.

I have tried to explain to a client why it is better to work around business hours to do this but I must not be articulating it very well and am hoping if he seeís some other opinions on this it will be a little easier to digest. I also have an idea he believes that once itís up and running everything will be fine and we should not need any time afterwards to follow-up.

He wants to put a Panther Server in place along with several other services. There are 6 machines running OS 9 and 4 OS X machines, one of them being a laptop. He believes the Server can be setup as a simple fileserver and should just take a couple of hours to setup and also do the following:

1. Setup the server in his words as “a simple fileserver.”

2. Move Now Contact/Calendar server from a previous OS 9 computer to OS X.3 server and setup 2 to 4 clients to connect and sync. He thinks this will take a few minutes to copy the files.

3. Move a Filemaker Pro Marketing database that was originally setup to serve
four people to the server and now make it available to 4 persons for marketing purposes.

4. Setup Retrospect on the server and configure all clients to connect, backup and shutdown every day and have a full backup once a week.

These are his words: ìI want simply a straight ahead file server, a back up system, and the NOW and FMP6 in place. You should be able to do that in a couple of hours”

He suggests a two-step process: Do all the things that can be done WITHOUT putting it on line in advance – the ips, the configurations, etc, and get that right on a desk without connecting to anything else. (All the computers have static ipís)

What is your opinion on this? What is your opinion on how long it will take? He thinks this can be done in 2 or 3 sessions of 2-3 hours each before the staff arrives in the morning. I have explained the process and how long this will take perhaps your 2 cents will either help or show him that I am a total fool. At this point I will take that chance.

Thank you for you time.

[chiefgeek]

I would figure on a nice long weekend.

Sure, if everything goes well, it might take less time, but when does everything go well. Heck, Retrospect alone could be a day long process as goofy as that software is. Plus, ideally you’d like to test it on a fairly sizable backup and restore.

I haven’t worked with FM server or Now before, but those are each a half day project, minimum.

I’ve found that mornings are never good for setup. You are constantly under the gun to finish before everybody arrives. Set it all up in a test mode first, then go live over a weekend and be available all day Monday if needed.

HTH

[Author]

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