TSE had been struggling with keeping employees and the owners up to date with due dates for jobs, leave, and appointments. The old system involved going to the office and writing in diary. Compliance was low for appointments, pointless for due dates and writing in leave was only useful for accounting and the owner. TSE needed to better publicise events. So I suggested Lightning. This is a calendar plugin for Thunderbird. Anyone can add an event, and have it seen by the rest of the company. Because Lightning is part of Thunderbird it is visible whenever staff check their emails. It was chosen because we did not have any calendaring software, it was free, and it works.

Radicale was installed to serve calendars over the network. Without it the calendars would only be seen by the user who created them.

Each employee at TSE used to store all the files that they created for a client on their own computer. There was no common method for saving files. This was an issue for the following reasons:-

• Files might be saved under the clients name, or they might be saved under the type of product that was engraved.
• This made it hard to find files if the employee was away If sales staff wanted to see what the client ordered last time, it was easier for them to interrupt one of the engravers than it was to find the file themselves.
• Backups took longer
• Backups required that each computer had to stay switched on

To solve this I:-

1. Talked with the boss and the employees about the pros and cons of changing from what we were doing.
2. Created an action plan
3. Made a backup of the companies data.
4. I used Krename to change the files to the format <product type> - <filename> - <organisation name>
   and where I didn't know the organisations name, I used the type of engraving instead. Krename is a bulk renaming application.
5. I merged the directories together using Linux. Linux can do merges, Windows XP can't. They were the two OSs available at work
6. Setup a backup system on Windows XP and using rsync and a series of portable hard drives.

There were teething issues.

• Initially I used the Linux mail server to also act as a fileserver. This was too slow for those people using CorelDraw to access files. Solved by switching to a Windows XP fileserver.
• Windows can't tell the difference between a directory called 'bob' and one called 'Bob' when looking at them over the network. Solved by using Linux and manually renaming.
• The merging didn't work where some employees used abbreviations and others didn't, eg PND and Palmerston North Drainlayers. Solved by manually renamng the directories.
• Some employees couldn't find files. Solved by training, or by using the old filesystem and resaving in the new one.

I guesstimate that planning and talking took 15 hours over the course of three weeks. The initial merger took two hours of labour time. The teething issues took about 12 hours.

The biggest benefactor has been the owner. He is responsible for keeping track of jobs that involve the different departments, and doing quotes. He finds it much faster now that he only needs to look in one place instead of several.