Client wants to do IT purchasing.

I do have one suggestion... Let him try to make it work... Odds are he will have to at a minimum, call you to walk him through a few different things. If he has no knowledge of domains, he probably won't join the computer to the domain. If you are really lucky, he will order XP home. As you probably know, this is a common mistake. Pretty soon they should see that by trying to save a few bucks, they wasted a few more.

Once the business management give the go ahead their is nothing that you can do beyond writting your concerns down and given them a copy of that document. Then when they ring up and have a problem charge them extra for this added work.

The person who pays the bills decides what is done - simple.

I can understand your feeling in this situation. This happens in many projects in a smaller and bigger scope, when wrong people are put in responsible positions.

Your scope does not include the final outcome of the work and you have taken enough steps to take caution to the management.

You can document your observation and send this to the VP. (This will be an evidence when you try to tell him that you told so..Probably next time he will listen to you..) You can try to escalate beyond the VP if you think this may seriously harm their IT infrastructure with specific details.

If you get a chance to meet with the VP and this IT person together, you can throw some relevant questions about the work in question, and try to expose his ignorance.

If nothing seems to work, you can now relax now and charge them extra when you have to redo the entire work or correct all the bad work done.

I would suggest that you just sit back and see what happens. I agree with the other suggestion posted, that you should give them a written copy of a report, mentioning you concerns about the new system. Wait and see what happens. if everything goes wrong with the system, you will show that you explained your concerns at the report.
Good luck

Leave it alone and watch but be available when there is a problem. Anything you say , no matter how right you are could be construed as negative and unhelpful. Chill and do not be too passionate.

This could be a blessing in disguise.

In the past, when I ran my own IT support consultancy, I used to give the bosses of this sort of user a written appraisal of what would go wrong when their "entusiastic but inexperienced" staff would try to do things themselves.

As we were correct in our assessments in every case we always found ourselves being contracted to sort out the problems that the staffer caused when they inevitably couldn't do the job. We also secured contracts for all future upgrades and installations too as a result of our demonstrating our expertise in this way.

Look at this as an opportunity rather than a problem.

Well it sounds to me as though you have proven yourself over and over to this company and I have all ideas this new deck swabber will sink his own ship (pun intended)Secure what you need to and I bet it doesn't take him long at all.

Well the decision is out of your hands. Let them go ahead and not only buy the Hardware but install it and try to get it working.

When this guy stuffs up the entire system you'll have plenty of work sorting it all out and you should charge them for it as they made the mess not you.

The only way that a lot of these places learn is through experience and paying for that experience. If this person buys a heap of rubbish so much the better as you can then honestly say that it will not work properly on the system. With a bit of luck this person will settle for XP Home to save a bit of money as he doesn't need anything more.

No matter what by attempting to stop this from happening you are the one who will be hung out to dry. As you say you have no agreement with them so it looks to the VP that you are only after the profits in selling them new hardware and he thinks that he has a perfectly good staff member who is capable of doing the work so let them go ahead.

Of course when you get called in charge them by the Hour and sell them Retail Software as OEM can not be sold without hardware stick to the MS rules and you can not go wrong.

I had this happen at one place once and it took 4 weeks to fix up the mess after the new workstation was installed and the network trashed. The very little that they saved in the initial purchase was more than eaten up by the down time not to mention my fees to fix it all up again.

Col