Q: What did you like about this solution?
We like the availability of NT tools and moving away from a proprietary
solution. NT creates a foundation that supports industry standards and a wide
range of communications services, applications, development tools, database
products, and systems management utilities. NT also lets us deploy
state-of-the-art applications, such as Microsoft's Internet Information Server,
IE 3.0, and Normandy. (Normandy is an integrated family of serverspersonalization,
chat, news, mail, information retrieval, membership, content replication, and
merchantthat Microsoft is developing for Internet communities, and
CompuServe is pioneering Normandy implementation. For information about
Normandy, go to www.microsoft.com/internet/normandy. For information about
the Merchant system component, see Ronald Arden, "Safe Internet Shopping
with Microsoft Merchant System.")
Q: What didn't you like about this solution?
Our needs were always a step ahead of Microsoft's solutions. For example,
NT's original RPC locator facility was weak. Programmers use RPCs to let their
applications communicate with other modules or services running on remote
servers. To reduce programming maintenance in a large, ever-changing enterprise
environment, programmers must be able to direct RPC calls to a locator service
rather than hard-coding them to a specific application on a specific machine. So
the locator plays an important role in locating the appropriate service on the
network and in facilitating communication between the programs. Microsoft's RPC
locator had difficulty communicating across the different segments of
CompuServe's diverse network.
Microsoft initially responded by saying that the RPC was something the
company might fix in the future but that the RPC was not the highest priority.
Then a Microsoft business manager helped us work out agreements that laid the
ground rules for further beta testing of Microsoft's RPC locator. Microsoft
agreed to release the source code to CompuServe to let us rewrite the RPC
locator to solve our specific problems. As a result, CompuServe gained
confidence in moving forward with NT.
Also, NT's original Domain Name System (DNS) Server didn't work,
which forced us to use a UNIX-based DNS Server. We expect that NT 4.0's new DNS
Server will fix this problem.
What can you recommend to your peers?
Don't underestimate the need for NT training. This applies to programmers
and developers and operations personnel charged with monitoring and managing the
network and its components. IS managers can save themselves many headaches by
having good systems management tools in place before they put the conversion
into production.