At Microsoft TechEd 2000, Windows 2000 Magazine presented six Best of Show awards in three categories: Windows 2000, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server. The winners came from a pool of approximately 100 entries from which the judges identified products that solve particular business needs in an intuitive and elegant fashion.
Windows 2000 Best of Show winner NSI Software's GeoCluster for Windows 2000/NT extends Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) clusters across multiple locations by replicating disks to each cluster node over any IP-based LAN, WAN, or Storage Area Network (SAN) and uses TCP/IP to synchronize replicated data volumes. The product provides third-party backup applications with read-only access to open files on offline nodes to improve existing backup schemes' reliability and performance.
The other Windows 2000 Best of Show winner, Heroix's RoboER, lets IT professionals reach and repair otherwise inaccessible Win2K and NT systems from anywhere in the company to avoid costly reboots. RoboER provides a text-based command shell over TCP/IP or a serial connection to a standard COM port.
The Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Best of Show award winners were Tacit Knowledge Systems' KnowledgeMail and Active Voice's Unity Enterprise 2.3. The KnowledgeMail product family provides everyone in the enterprise with access to public and private knowledge while preserving user control and privacy. Unity Enterprise provides a unified messaging solution for easy storage and retrieval of voice, fax, and email messages. Unity Enterprise sports a Web interface for simple management of voice email options, a text-to-speech engine for retrieving email over the phone, and interoperability with a wide range of voicemail systems.
Giganet won the SQL Server Best of Show award for its cLAN Host Adapter and cLAN Cluster Switch server farm networking technologies, which provide Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition with Plug and Play (PnP) multinode server clusters. Through support for SQL Server 2000's new Virtual Interface (VI) architecture, this product lets administrators scale their database environments while providing performance and reliability gains.
The other SQL Server Best of Show award winner, Knosys' ProClarity, offers powerful yet easy-to-manipulate views into SQL Server OLAP services data. ProClarity uses a standard ActiveX component architecture to harness the power of OLAP. Knosys also provides an extensive application development kit for creating custom analytical applications.
At the Windows 2000 Connections conference, Windows 2000 Magazine presented a Best of Show award to Lightspeed Systems for its IP Magic Technology. IP Magic Technology provides a unique and interesting solution to IP management problems.