Interview with Bruce MacNaughton

Q: What did you like about this solution?

We like the availability of NT tools and moving away from a proprietarysolution. NT creates a foundation that supports industry standards and a widerange of communications services, applications, development tools, databaseproducts, and systems management utilities. NT also lets us deploystate-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, andmerchant­that Microsoft is developing for Internet communities, andCompuServe is pioneering Normandy implementation. For information aboutNormandy, go to www.microsoft.com/internet/normandy. For information aboutthe Merchant system component, see Ronald Arden, "Safe Internet Shoppingwith 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 theirapplications communicate with other modules or services running on remoteservers. To reduce programming maintenance in a large, ever-changing enterpriseenvironment, programmers must be able to direct RPC calls to a locator servicerather than hard-coding them to a specific application on a specific machine. Sothe locator plays an important role in locating the appropriate service on thenetwork and in facilitating communication between the programs. Microsoft's RPClocator had difficulty communicating across the different segments ofCompuServe's diverse network.

Microsoft initially responded by saying that the RPC was something thecompany 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 theground rules for further beta testing of Microsoft's RPC locator. Microsoftagreed to release the source code to CompuServe to let us rewrite the RPClocator to solve our specific problems. As a result, CompuServe gainedconfidence 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 DNSServer will fix this problem.

What can you recommend to your peers?

Don't underestimate the need for NT training. This applies to programmersand developers and operations personnel charged with monitoring and managing thenetwork and its components. IS managers can save themselves many headaches byhaving good systems management tools in place before they put the conversioninto production.