Remote office setup ideas?

[wizzball]

Our company has decided to rent a remote office and move around 45 staff over for an 18 month project. After those 18 months the site will be decommissioned and the staff will move back to head office.

What the company has asked us in BT is to come up with two scenarios, one basic and one more advanced. Ideally the CEO want the remote office to feel as if they are still on our normal LAN within the building, even though they are 5km away.

Scenario 1 - 1mb or 2mb link into our MPLS cloud. Staff will connect to SAP, intranet sites, internet access, Exchange, File servers, etc over this link. (Staff in remote office will use all the same systems as staff at the Head Office)

Scenario 2 - 1mb or 2mb link into our MPLS cloud. Staff will connect to SAP, intranet sites, internet access, File servers, etc over this link. Exchange server will be installed at remote site to handle mailboxes for those 45 staff and will send/receive mail through to the H/O Exchange server (Staff in remote office will use all the same systems as staff at the Head Office)

In both scenarios there will be a DC/DNS/A.D server on site. The users My Documents will be synced to that server for backups.

Unfortunately we have been given 2 days to come up with a full plan and costing for both scenarios as well as a time line.

Please ask any questions you can think of, our brains are imploding with all the info we're trying to get.

Thanks.

 

[ponder]

What the company has asked us in BT is to come up with two scenarios, one basic and one more advanced. Ideally the CEO want the remote office to feel as if they are still on our normal LAN within the building, even though they are 5km away.

That's a tall order.

If you have line of site you could try wireless with wired backup.

Alternatively maybe a thin client setup so only screen, keyboard & mouse traffic travels across the link. I'm not familiar with SAP and it's bandwidth requirements in all honesty.

 

[wizzball]

That's a tall order.

If you have line of site you could try wireless with wired backup.

Alternatively maybe a thin client setup so only screen, keyboard & mouse traffic travels across the link. I'm not familiar with SAP and it's bandwidth requirements in all honesty.

The Broadlink connection we are looking at is a line of site system that links into the MTN datacentres and from there directly into our MPLS cloud. Unfortunately think clients wouldn't work as users require full access to all company systems as I mentioned previously. SAP is only one of the many requirements that they have, ie. Full Outlook 2003 with Exchange/appointments/meetings/meeting room bookings, access to internal company websites (3 as far as I'm aware), internet browsing/FTP, access to the company file servers, etc.

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

Having a local vs remote exchange server is better. Before we switched to gmail, we had a local one. Massive difference in our office. But even though we are on Gmail, I use offlineimap & dovecot to keep it local.

 

[Conradl]

The Broadlink connection we are looking at is a line of site system that links into the MTN datacentres and from there directly into our MPLS cloud. Unfortunately think clients wouldn't work as users require full access to all company systems as I mentioned previously. SAP is only one of the many requirements that they have, ie. Full Outlook 2003 with Exchange/appointments/meetings/meeting room bookings, access to internal company websites (3 as far as I'm aware), internet browsing/FTP, access to the company file servers, etc.

That is exactly the point of thin clients, so that people can get the same look and feel of the system; but at a remote branch....