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Single server, several services: The Microsoft Internet Information Server allows for web, FTP and Gopher services to all be managed from the same setup area. Publishing's pluses and minuses of Windows NT 4.0Newspaper systems were so much easier in the old days, weren't they? Step 1: Order an Atex J11 or something similar. Step 2: Turn it on. Step 3: Spend three years writing typesetting formats. You bought the J11, which came loaded with all the software you needed. Now life is much, much better -- we don't have to pay zillions and zillions of dollars for a proprietary system. We can save money by building a system using standard hardware and software. Of course, this a tad more complicated than, say, the old thumbs up/thumbs down when choosing between Atex and SII. Now it's our responsibility to discuss the relative merits of client software, word processors, 1.65 million Quark XPress XTensions ... you get the picture. One completely new area of discussion is the Network Operating System. Mainframe and mini systems don't use a network operating system, they use a single large computer that interacts with users through dumb (or semi-intelligent) terminals. The progression from dumb terminals to PCs has changed that. While PCs are pretty good at acting independently, something is needed to make them work together if, for instance, you had a sudden urge to put out a newspaper. There used to pretty much be one choice in an NOS; Novell's Netware dominated the market. But Novell made the fatal mistake of deciding its main mission was to fight Microsoft, instead of taking care of its core networking business. Microsoft, meanwhile, was establishing itself in the NOS arena. It struggled for a while with a product called LAN Manager, then launched Windows NT 3.1. Despite the nomenclature, it was a 1.0 rev -- and was treated accordingly by information systems managers everywhere. Microsoft is nothing if not persistent, however. The second rev of NT -- 3.5 -- began to make serious inroads into Novell's business. NT was bomb-proof, had certified C-2 government security, was cheap and easy to run -- for an NOS, anyway. NT sales have now hit the billion-dollar-a-year level, and are still doubling annually. Comes now NT 4.0, which was released to manufacturers this summer and will be on sale this fall. At the same time, it seems like every other supplier is rolling out an NT product line. Should you consider NT for your newsroom? As always, The Cole Papers is here to guide you with definitive advice, like this: It depends. Actually, there are three answers:
Note that we say consider; as always, your mileage may vary.
Flavor of the month
Workstation is pretty much useless for newspapers right now. Part of the reason NT is so bomb-proof is that it doesn't allow software to directly address hardware. Unfortunately, this knocks out a little piece of software newspapers need, called Adobe Type Manager. Everyone acknowledges Microsoft is correct from a design and stability point of view -- good operating systems don't allow software to circumvent the OS and address the hardware directly -- and Adobe promises to bring out an NT version of ATM next quarter. (Adobe's been saying that for, oh, 13 quarters now.) So Workstation is useful only if you use computers that needn't put out type. On the other hand, Server can fill three roles at a newspaper: as an NOS, obviously; as an Internet server for new media projects, and as an intranet server for internal publishing systems such as an electronic library. As an NOS, NT has much to recommend it -- and a few big drawbacks. With the noted exception of the clustering technology, NT is as bomb-proof as it gets. Novell's Netware, on the other hand, allows Netware Loadable Modules (NLM) to run as part of the NOS, which means unforeseeable problems when NLMs from third-party suppliers decide they don't like each other. NT allows nothing to run in the same memory space as the operating system, making it just about impossible for a rogue program to take down the entire system. For example, Cheyenne Software Inc.'s notoriously unstable ARCserve network backup software NLM (my favorite bug: one version deleted files instead of backing them up) becomes the tame-as-a-kitten ARCserve NT when locked out of the NOS memory area. Another plus is NT Server's workstation mode, which is especially handy for small installations. Many NOSes -- again, Netware is one example -- require that most administration software run on a client machine, rather than the server. NT allows you to boot a workstation shell, then run management and network applications such as ARCserve from the server console. This mode can also be disabled. What about those drawbacks? Probably the biggest is that NT 4.0 still uses the antiquated domain security system. Machines are assigned to domains, and user rights are assigned according to those domains; there can be lots of domains on a network. This is actually as easy or easier than anything else in small networks; you can have separate domains for separate departments. As a Local Area Network grows into a Wide Area Network, however, this grows into something that is at best Byzantine. An NT OPI, for example, is probably running in the Production Domain. It would be nice if the OPI could be accessed by your paginators back in the Editorial Domain. But if you simply make Editorial a trusted domain for Production, everyone in Editorial has access to the OPI, right down to the clerks, which you probably don't want. (Trust us: If it is possible, someone will send 425 copies of a style change memo to a film RIP.) The solution -- which usually involves multiple logins -- is ugly to implement and nasty to administer. NT desperately needs a true network directory services system such as Novell's NDS or Sun's UNIX products. Microsoft had been promising directory services for the next NT release, code named Cairo. But Cairo is years late already, and won't ship for at least another year. General outrage has prompted Microsoft to begin beta testing the NT Distributed File System, which InfoWorld now reports may ship as early as this fall. While this may appear to be a small issue, it ought to be an extraordinarily serious consideration for newspapers, which tend to work across departments to pull together the final product. If departments are all split off into domains as per the usual practice -- graphics, photo, editorial, production -- it is almost a certainty that you will end up with a domain system resembling a Gordian knot.
New media in a box
It comes loaded with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS): World-Wide Web, FTP and Gopher servers in a single management setup; a new graphic Domain Name Services package; Microsoft FrontPage Web authoring and management tools, and the Tripoli autoindexing product. IIS is a fast, stable server. On a box that costs less than $2000, IIS can fill a T-1 or a 10-megabit Ethernet connection with ease. (We haven't been able to test it on 100 baseT, but it ought to be able to fill that, too, without maxing out.) The new DNS server is a huge improvement -- but then again, it had to be. The text-based DNS setup that shipped in the NT 3.51 resource kit was so horrible that it wouldn't even load and run the sample files shipped with it. Microsoft's FrontPage is currently the best web development tool on the market. It has a pretty good WYSIWYG web page editor that handles tables and frames with aplomb, and a strong site management package that is smart enough to do things like allow you to develop a site on a test machine, then transfer the entire web -- complete with subdirectories, graphics, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) links, etc. -- to your server, updating all the links on the fly. This instant CGI technique works for setups as complicated as threaded chat areas. While we haven't had a chance to set up and test the Tripoli Web indexing server, we can report that the File Transfer Protocol and Gopher servers are about what you'd expect -- fast and easy to use.
Newspaper applications
American Computer Innovators Inc. of Amherst, Mass., for example, is currently building systems on NT 3.51, according to Warren Ondras, vice president for research and development. While ACI is "very interested" in NT 4.0, it is not selling it for the moment, said Ondras. "On the server side, we want to be sure it is a fully reliable, stable platform before we start shipping servers based on it. There are a number of third-party products (Oracle, ARCserve, etc.) which will need to be fully tested, and possibly upgraded before it is 'safe' to use it," Ondras said. Though ACI is "optimistic that this will be possible in the near future," he said, all current installations are 3.51-based. NT Workstation is on hold because applications have not been written to use it, Ondras said. "Right now, Quark XPress is 16-bit, and ATM for NT is not yet available. This hinders performance and compatibility," he said. "However, both products should be shipping in 32-bit, NT-compatible form in the near future. When this happens, and the requisite bug-squashing takes place, I think NT 4.0 will be a fabulous publishing platform." ACI's OpenPages publishing system is running on Windows NT 3.51 servers at three sites: Waterbury Republican-American in Connecticut (home of this writer); Daily News, McKeesport, Pa., and the Citizen, Laconia, N.H. OpenPages is also being installed at Foster's Daily Democrat in Dover, N.H. Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, is using both NT Server and Workstation, according to Don Oldham, founder and chief executive officer. "DT currently uses NT Server as a host for its editorial, pagination, classified and ad production databases. Before the end of the year we will also support our archiving and graphics databases on NT," said Oldham. "On the client side, we are nearly done porting our classified order entry system to Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, and next year will port our editorial text-editing client as well." The Macintosh-based pagination and display ad clients will remain on the Mac "for the foreseeable future," said Oldham. The programming aces at CText Inc. are wrapping up Dateline/NT, a Windows NT version of the Dateline editorial system originally designed to use OS/2-based clients, according to Jeff Litvak, product manager at CText, which is based in Ann Arbor, Mich. "We've completely redesigned the user interface to take advantage of all the bells and whistles in the Win NT 4.0/Win 95 Gui," Litvak said. "We've also added graphics support and are finishing development that will allow us to store page information in our database." The structure of the CText database "has not significantly changed," he said. "It's possible to mix and match OS/2 and NT Dateline workstations on a single system." However, XyWrite, the text editor on the OS/2-based workstation will be supplanted by Microsoft Word for Windows 95, Litvak said. And CText's own Tomahawk composition engine also will fall by the wayside. "Instead, we're gluing in composition software developed by North Atlantic Publishing [Systems Inc. of Carlisle, Mass.] -- a product called Napsengine, which allows us to use Quark XPress as the composition engine from within Word," he said. "H&J lengths reported on the front-end system are identical with how the story will be composed when it flows onto an XPress page because it is literally Quark XPress handling user H&J requests," Litvak said. CText plans to go to beta with the NT version near the end of October, with release scheduled for January. CText also will be porting the AdVision classified advertising front-end from OS/2 to Windows NT. "We're shooting to have a demonstration of this software for NEXPO '97," said Litvak. System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento, Calif., likes NT and is both porting existing software to the Microsoft operating system and developing new products for it, according to Steve Nilan, vice president for marketing and business development. They include the refurbished version of the MTX editorial client (that ran on OS/2) called Coyote/NT, the Coyote/3 (a version of the old RoadRunner product that runs on Windows 95 or NT) and the new products from Cybergraphic Systems Pty. Ltd. of Australia -- CyberNews, CyberPage and Cyber$ell -- which SII has licensed to sell in North America, Europe, Africa and South America. Nilan said the Coyote products would be available in the first quarter of 1997 and that two Cybergraphic sites were to be installed in September. SII has other NT server products planned, Nilan said, including the MediaVu media archiving solution, which now runs on UNIX. Pat Sorn of Mission Critical Technologies Inc. said her Concord, Mass.-based company has two Windows NT products: Adfast.com provides a means for a newspaper to receive Internet ads directly into its classified system, and to automatically provide pricing and linage feedback back out to the advertisers. Adfast.com uses NT Server as the web server running the programs that provide the bridge between newspaper systems and the Web. Adfast Api is an NT-based communication bridge between systems in large advertising agencies and a newspaper, said Sorn. The application converts ads from existing advertising systems into a format compatible with Mission Critical's Adcommand server at newspapers, and can auto-dial, send and receive updates from the server. -- Christopher J. Feola
American Computer Innovators Inc., From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved. |
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