Taking the Good and Making it Better
Darrell J. Bradford
Professor Kurt Brandquist
CIS 210 Systems Analysis and Development
March 23, 2014

As Tony’s Chips ventures into this new developmental stage, my team and I have been tasked with the assignment to take the current website which is hosted by an outside vendor and migrate it to one that is in house. As there are many concerns as how the business will fair due to a drastic move like this, it is our job to make sure this runs as smooth as possible. The team here will be to accomplish this request as well as upgrade the site to allow the customers more access to the products. We will be essentially starting from ground up so we will have to use our time and resources wisely. But we have many tools and items at our disposal. We have a few tasks to accomplish to deliver the site in a timely and secure fashion. We will carefully layout our goals, determine a strong web architecture; move an existing website with minimal downtime; provide a disaster recovery solution to ensure the site is always available; and lastly evaluate the performance of the new site and the success of your project. Below is an outline of the entire project.

Our first step in this large website migration project is for us to understand the needs of the business. But in order to accomplish this we need to create a business case. The business case will be the “reasons, or justification, for a proposal” (Shelley-Rosenblatt, 9th Edition). We need to examine some key topics that deal with this project. Firstly, why are we doing this project? Simple, as Tony’s Chips is now part of an independent company we want to keep everything in house. One of our main goals here is to have more control over our site, but we also are looking for better performance, reduced costs, and improved service from this. This new website will be effective, secure, but more importantly user friendly. Since we have an existing site we can use this is an upside. We can find out what about the current site that users like and what they don’t like. Also, do they understand that site as is? All these questions play into the project’s feasibility standpoint. The expected cost and the benefits must be taken into consideration. Our preliminary investigation utilized methods to allow us to find opportunities for growth within the project scope, analyze project cost and benefits and usability which ultimately let us evaluate the project feasibility. The main concern here is smoothly migrating the system over to our internal server and not creating any downtime.
Next we must plan the web architecture. Here, we need to understand how the web architecture will work and what it will contain. Our intent is to provide the best operational and adaptability qualities while keeping cost to a minimum. It has been decided that the web architecture shall consist of the operating system, the database, the web server, and software for server side scripting. Another key we are looking for here is to make sure that all these components are compatible with one another. They need to fit together just like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Without compatibility the system will have holes and breaks that could cause in system failure and ultimately a loss of profit.
There are many operating system that we can chose from to use as our interface for the new website. The many operating systems can vary by usability, language used, platform, and once again, cost. Some example of operating systems can include Windows, UNIX, OS X, IIS, and others. We have chosen to use Linux for this project. The biggest advantage of using Linux over the others is cost. Linux “is free to obtain, while Microsoft products are available for a hefty and sometimes recurring fee. Microsoft licenses typically are only allowed to be installed on a single computer, whereas a Linux distribution can be installed on any number of computers, without paying a