Kevin King and his department within the Oklahoma Supreme Court have a big job, and it’s about to get bigger. As manager of information services for the court, King supervised the replacement of an aging mainframe system with a new client/server architecture that provides Web-based court and legal information for eight of Oklahoma’s largest counties. By the end of 2001, the system will extend to all of the state’s 77 counties. King and his colleagues chose the highly scalable Microsoft® Windows® 2000 platform—including Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2000 Professional for clients—to handle massive amounts of data and provide easy, 24x7 statewide access to critical data for the courts, legal professionals, and the public.
Customer Profile
The Oklahoma Supreme Court maintains a large and growing IT network that serves lawyers, public interest groups, and individuals. To manage the transition from an aging mainframe system, the court’s information services department chose to deploy the Windows® 2000 platform.
"When I started in 1997, we had to make the caseload system accessible by network throughout the state, implement e-mail, bring more efficiency to the processing of legal documents, and make everything Y2K compliant," King says. "We needed a PC architecture for that, and not just another legacy patch. We used Windows NT® 4.0 when first designing the system, and adopted Windows 2000 in the very beginning. I installed Beta 1 in my office."
King continues, "We chose the Windows 2000 platform because it was the only operating system that could do it all—run a very dispersed mission-critical network, scale to a very large size, and offer the tools that make it relatively easy and cost-effective to manage."
Aggressive Timeline to Convert Legacy Data
King says the integrated tools and applications in the Windows 2000 platform enabled his department to work within a tight timeframe for converting from the legacy system to the client/server network. They began in August 1999, and completed 95 percent of the conversion by early 2000. The system currently serves 1,450 internal clients in the eight counties. It contains information on 60 percent of the entire state’s caseload, including 250,000 public documents, and provides access to law libraries and information on court rules, procedures, and standard forms. The Web site receives about 120,000 external hits daily from lawyers, public data research firms, and people doing background checks. These numbers are expected to grow exponentially when the network is expanded to all counties.
Multiple Windows 2000 Features Key to Services
The court’s IT system relies on the scalability of Microsoft SQL ServerTM 7.0, which is assuming all of the data previously stored in the mainframe, plus all new documents and data. Approximately 75 million docket records in Oklahoma County alone comprise about 25 gigabytes. King says that SQL Server 7.0 and the Windows 2000 platform will handle multiple terabytes of data when the entire state is on the network.
King adds, "The COM services provide a very robust environment for our transaction processing capabilities. The Windows 2000 Active DirectoryTM service makes management of a highly distributed system really easy. It’s very easy to organize and find users and user records. We’ve been able to consolidate all of our desktops in a single domain, down from 35. We’re also using the Terminal Services to remotely manage servers at 35 sites, which saves us enormous time and effort by eliminating travel to those spots."
The end-to-end offerings of the Windows 2000 platform made the conversion possible, King says. "We’re using Windows 2000 Advanced Server on eight-way Compaq server hardware. There is so much power and scalability that we’ve barely begun to tap the potential of this combination," he says.
Software and Services
COM objects
Office 2000
SQL ServerTM 7.0
Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Server, and Professional with Internet Information Services 5.0
