An Interview with Telemac

Windows NT Magazine recently asked two of the leading figures inTelemac's Debit Technology about implementing the project. Greg McGregor isTelemac's director of software planning, and John Dismuke is Telemac's directorof MIS/communications. Here's what they had to say.

Q: What did you like about the project's implementation?

Greg: It was easy. I've spent years under Unix and nothing was everthis easy. It works as you expect and is very stable. Having choices fordevelopment tools was nice. Unix tools are typically too expensive and few andfar between. Telephony let us share devices with the system and create a remoteservice unit for our debit phones.

John: I was already familiar with NT. It has security features andease of use that you can't get anywhere else.

Q: What didn't you like about the project's implementation?

Greg: With the telephony, a lot of setup and research goes intorunning TAPI. I didn't like that at all. That tells me just that much more cango wrong. It would have been nicer to have TAPI broken up differently throughsome C++ classes or derivations.

John: Nothing. So far, the system has been running flawlessly.

Q: What would you have done differently on the project?

Greg: At this point, nothing. It was a home-run success. NT offeredeverything we needed--reliably without mystery.

John: Nothing. The biggest problem was making the decision to gofrom Unix to NT. We are, however, in the process of implementing some redundancysuch as a RAID 5 server. We're also changing over from 10 Base T to 100 Base T.

Q: What advice can you give your peers?

Greg: Seriously consider NT for your business solution; you might bepleasantly surprised!

John: When you buy components, make sure that they're NT compatible.