SBP also maintains a team of three Network Administrators who have full admin access to the entire network.

You are a Junior Network Administrator at Swift & Bacon Publishers (SBP) Ltd, a medium-sized company that deals with the publication of books and journals for the scientific and technical community. Books are published both as physical and electronic copies.

SBP Ltd is currently situated in two office buildings and contains four Publishing Teams that deal with subject-specific material: a team for Computer Science and Engineering, a team for Maths and Physics, a team for Biological and Chemical sciences, and a team for the Biomedical Sciences.

Each Publishing Team has a Publishing Team Leader (PTL), and up to 20 Publishing Editors (PE). Each team has their own secured area on the network. Each PE has access to their own content only, as well as any shared team documentation, but they do not have access to any other documentation.

The PTL can access all material for that team. There is an area for SBP company documentation that anyone can view.

SBP receives manuscripts securely from their authors into an encrypted Public Repository Server (PRS) located on the premises. The manuscripts are then extracted from this repository by one of the four PTLs, who then assign the manuscript to the PE.

All documentation and office software are located on a company file server. Once a manuscript has been reviewed, it is uploaded to the Secure Publishing Server (SPS) where the content is either sent electronically to an external printing company or is available for download by paying customers.

SBP also maintains a team of three Network Administrators who have full admin access to the entire network.

There is also a Senior Publishing Manager and CEO who have access to all company documentation. Since the 2020 pandemic, the company has realized that a hybrid working model is now most effective for their employees.

SBP is planning to close one office building completely to allow staff to work from home if they choose.

SBP wants to set up its remaining building in the following physical configuration.

  • The PRS and SPS servers are in a data center on the top floor.
  • The middle floor is a suite of five public meeting rooms with full wired and wireless access.
  • The Network Server Room containing the company network and email servers is on the middle floor. The network administrators are also located on the middle floor.
  • One network administrator must be present in the building each day. The on-site network administrator uses a desktop machine for server administration.
  • The ground floor is to be a collection of 20 open-plan ‘hot desks’ where employees who choose to come into work can go to any desk, plug their laptop into the cabled network and begin working.