Computing for accounting firm

[Mark A Allyn]

My father is the MIS manager of a medium size accounting firm. This firm
does payroll, audits, accounts receivable, taxes, and such for a variety
of cliants. These cliants include retail, manufacturing, and financial
services.

The firm has about 60 employees in two locations. About 50 employees are
at the main office in Boston, Mass and about 10 employees are at a satelite
office in Newton, Mass.

The firm currently has an IBM model 36 mini which they do their computing
work on. The software is written primarly in RPG. My father is the only
'computer literate' person in the place; he has spent his 
life with IBM system 3 then IBM system 36/38 world programming
in RPG.

The firm has purchased a number of pc's and clones in the meantime, mostly
for secretarial use in correspondence. At the current time, they are not
networked together and nothing is networked to the IBM/36. Now the firm
has asked my father, along with someone else who knows a little about the
pc's, to investigate the possibility of networking the PC's together, along
with getting some heavy duty (486 variety) servers, and maybee migrate their
software from the 36 to the PC's. They want to have 2 servers in Boston and
1 Server in Needham and somehow link the two of them together. They also want
to keep all of the files on the servers and have only minimal stuff on the 
pc's such as interoffice correspondence and mail.

What I would like to ask the net is this:

If you were in my father's place, and you were given management's carte
blance to spend (but be responsible - dont buy a CRAY Y-MP); what would you
do? Keep these things in mind:

1. Currently the PC's are running ms dos. Would you replace that with
   os/2 or xenix? Keep dos on the individual pc's but run something better
   on the servers?

2. What database would you use for the account receivable and payroll stuff?
   Ingress, Rbase, what? They handle payroll for a cumulate total of about
   1000 employees and account receivables for about 1000 cumulative customers
   (primarily clothing retail and heating oil).

3. What to get for servers? They are thinking of 386 or 486. They are looking
   at about 300 meg for each server.

4. What networking? Ethernet? Ring? TCP/IP Novell? What have you guys used
   and how well has it worked??

Thanks for any comments you may have!

Mark A. Allyn  phone    206-773-8308 (day)  206-526-8852 (nite)
			206-773-3576
			206-773-4393        if all fails:
			206-773-9110        digital pager 206-986-5553

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