tech options

NT Risks
Deploying Windows NT not all rosy

By Theo Gantos

Microsoft’s monopoly is not only stifling innovation, competition, and the industry, but their marketing machinery has many executives bamboozled as well.
Let’s say your small to mid-sized company is looking to develop an information infrastructure. You want internal email that is connected to the Internet. You want to share information with internal and selected external customers. You want to provide shared resources for information storage and archiving (a file server). You’ll want to facilitate collaboration through sharing customer and other contact information. You’d want to facilitate scheduling of events and tasks.
Your only option to accomplish this is to buy Microsoft Windows NT servers and spend tens of thousands of dollars putting it all together, making it work, and keeping it going, right? Not so. In fact, Windows NT is a relative newcomer to information infrastructure development. Let’s look at both sides of the issue.
There are a lot of developers writing programs for Windows NT right now. This makes for diversity in allowing you to select among different solutions to fit your business needs. Windows NT has some worthy and ambitious goals of bringing mainframe-class stability and performance to PC hardware. Windows NT seems to be “cool” right now; there is a lot of marketing hype to sway you.
The negatives turn out to be tougher to find at first glance. Like the proverb, “Act in haste, repent at leisure”, many companies deploying Windows NT have struggled to deliver on Microsoft’s marketing promises. There have been bugs, security issues, networking problems, complexity issues, compatibility problems, and unexpected software and support costs. These have made many question the soundness of their initial decision. Many just don’t have any choice. They’ve committed themselves to deploying Windows NT. Their only alternative at this point is to haul out their checkbook and start writing.
Windows NT 4.0 was a major new release from a features standpoint. Any major release takes time to work out all the bugs. Windows NT 4.0 is no exception. There have been three major bug fixes, known as “service packs” in Micro-speak. Service pack three lists nearly sixteen pages of issues. Many of these landmines don’t explode unless stepped-on, i.e. you may not know a bug exists until it bites you. This usually happens at very inconvenient times.
Security is a major issue for a system you are betting the organization on. Many hackers have seriously compromised Windows NT security. Microsoft has only passed government security standards (known as C2) under the so-called “orange book” guidelines, which preclude having the system connected to any network. Isn’t networking why companies wish to deploy NT? This one really keeps me up at night.
While Outlook Express and Microsoft Exchange look good in marketing literature, in practice they are complex and expensive to deploy across multiple workgroups or departments. Scan the want ads of any major city or call a headhunter and ask if they are looking for NT people with Microsoft Exchange or Outlook Express experience. You will find it is one of the highest demand technical specialties right now precisely because implementation can be so thorny.
Asking information systems managers faced with shrinking budgets about deploying NT and Exchange is like asking the fox to guard the hens. What an opportunity to expand staff and gain additional funding! Even those who may try to avoid this obvious conflict of interest will admit the appeal.
The bottom line is that technology managers need to look out for the interests of the organization. The conservative, if perhaps unpopular view is that Windows NT enterprise integration is still a resource sinkhole of unfathomable proportions. Next week I’ll discuss some safer, less expensive, higher performance and highly effective alternatives to committing your organization to deploying Microsoft Windows NT. Send comments or questions regarding enterprise-wide solutions to theo@tekainc.com.

Theo Gantos is president of TEKA, a technology consulting firm. Contact him: