An Examination of Huffman Trucking's Operating System

An examination of Huffman Trucking's Operating Systems

Dennis Burlison

POS-355

September 5, 2011

Jean McKay

An examination of Huffman Trucking's Operating Systems

Operating systems and structures are an important part of the daily operations of a company. The right choice and configuration can make a dramatic difference in the performance and output at the company. In this paper we are going to examine the operating systems chosen by Huffman Trucking a privately owned trucking company based in Cleveland, Ohio with satellite offices in Los Angeles California, St Louis Missouri, and Bayonne New Jersey. This paper will outline the operating systems and the possible reasons for choosing them, and the implications of these choices.

Examining Huffman's network diagrams makes it is easy to see that they have implemented different standard at many of their locations. The California Office has the newest setup of the locations using Windows XP, Mac OS10, and Windows 2000 professional. The other satellite locations employ much older operating system technology ranging from windows 3.1 to windows 98 (Virtual Organizations University of Phoenix, 2004) . The employment of different systems in the California office implies that Huffman see each department as a separate entity instead of a single company. This also applies to each of the Huffman Trucking locations as they are all treated separately with their own setup and equipment. The use of these outdated, no longer supported operating systems tells us that they are need of a technology makeover as these systems could cause serious company-wide security issues.

Huffman trucking has also employed Windows 2000 server, Windows Exchange 5, and Windows proxy server 2. Although both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems are compatible with Windows 2000 server (Edesingnuk, 2011), Windows 3.x and 9x operating systems are not. The biggest drawback of using these systems is that they are no longer supported by Microsoft and lack the capability to be upgraded in both hardware and memory. If Huffman Trucking wishes to remain competitive and eliminate redundancy throughout their company they must convert to a standardized current operating system. Looking at the most current operating systems at the California location a Windows-based system would be the best choice to deploy throughout its physical locations. Included in these recommendation would be a service-oriented architecture to plane out the network connections and a method that would allow the current system to be tied together from the HR databases to the bar code system (Erl, 2005). These changes with a few software updates