With Windows 2000 the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Liz
Warren investigates what really happens when you implement Windows
2000 by talking to three organisations that have trusted their
businesses to systems running Windows 2000 and revisits Win2K
reference site Leicester University
Dulwich Preparatory School in Cranbrook, Kent, is a
co-educational independent school for children aged from three to
13, with around 540 day and boarding pupils. One of the school's
attractions is the excellent computing facilities it offers to
students.
The school has been a long-term user of thin-client technology
and uses Microsoft Windows interfaces on a number of legacy
machines from Acorn. On top of that, explains Andrew Flowerdew,
head of information and communication technologies at the school,
using thin-client technology running on the school's newer
terminals from NCD provides better security. "For example, we have
a number of machines sited in reception areas or offices where
staff are not present all the time, and thin-client technology
offers the security we're looking for there," he says.
Until recently, the school's thin-client computing was based on
NT 4.0, but Flowerdew was keen to move to Win2000 as quickly as
possible. "Windows 2000 will provide the same look and feel as
Windows 98, which many pupils use at home," he explains. "Also, as
a school policy, we like to keep up with the latest
technologies."
Another benefit of Win2000 is that it allows Flowerdew to
delegate responsibility for a number of administrative tasks to
individual departments within the school. "Active Directory
Services means department heads can control aspects such as
printing and how the interface appears," he explains. "Taking that
admin load away from the IT department gives us more time to handle
important issues that others can't, and to do the really technical
things." Flowerdew says that the greater control of the desktop and
system policies provided by Active Directory Services reduces the
support burden on the IT department. In addition, the school has
seen fewer problems with client machines since introducing the new
operating system.
Win2000 has allowed Flowerdew to implement the same desktop on
both fat and thin clients, using Intellimirror. This allows the
school's small IT team to publish updates of application software
to fat clients with minimum effort. It also provides consistency
within the teaching areas, where fat clients handle local
processing for applications such as digital photography and
videoconferencing. Here, the support provided by Win2000 Terminal
Services for Universal Serial Bus devices such as digital cameras,
which were simply not supported by NT 4.0, has proved a significant
benefit.
The school was a relatively early adopter of Win2000, beginning
its evaluation of the new operating system in June 1999 by running
Beta 3 on a couple of machines within the IT department. In
September, it rolled Win2000 out to both the thin-client machines
used by students and a number of fat clients in other areas that
were not running mission-critical applications. A number of other
machines were migrated in December 1999, bringing the current total
running Win2000 to around 40. The school plans to roll Win2000 out
to a further 110 machines this summer, having upgraded to the
release-to-manufacture (RTM) version when it became available in
February. According to Flowerdew, the switch to the new version was
"a breeze - the update is automatic".
To prepare for the implementation, Flowerdew took a one-week NT
to Win2000 conversion course that was run by Aris and subsidised by
Microsoft. He says the course was vital, particularly because it
allowed delegates to explore with others the probable issues
surrounding Active Directory Services. "It was important that we
were able to mull over ideas about how to change domain models and
so on," he says.
The course allowed Flowerdew to carry out most of the
implementation work in-house. When he got stuck, he turned to
Compaq and its Var Evergreen Electronics, from which the school
recently purchased some Compaq iPaqs and laptops with wireless
network cards. "Compaq and Evergreen were really helpful in
providing support and were able to resolve the few issues we had
within a couple of days," Flowerdew explains. "Now, adding new
machines with the basic operating system is very easy because of
the plug-and-play facilities within Windows 2000."
Flowerdew goes on to point out that Win2000 runs well on the
school's existing hardware: the school purchased its last two
servers - it tends to buy around one a year - with a Win2000
implementation in mind, but has found Win2000 runs adequately on
all its servers. These have a minimum specification of Dual Pentium
266s with at least 256Mbytes of Ram.
The school did encounter a number of minor issues with its
application software when it made the switch. For example, its
administrative accounting systems are based on FoxPro and a 32-bit
version of the database became available only after the school
rolled out Win2000. It has also found that the LDAPI implementation
of Netscape Messenger Server does not mesh with Active Directory,
so it will be moving to Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 this year.
Finally, its Citrix Metaframe implementation, which is a beta
version, does not always disconnect users properly, leaving hanging
sessions that tie up system resources - although Flowerdew suspects
that this could simply be a configuration issue.
Despite these drawbacks, Win2000 has delivered everything
Dulwich Preparatory School was looking for. In particular, the
ability to delegate client tasks and control the desktop through
Active Directory Services shows that Win2000 can benefit small IT
departments as well as large ones.
Going Places
Part of the Airtours UK Leisure Group, Going Places Leisure
Travel provides a full range of holiday and travel services through
more than 730 high-street retail outlets. Having appreciated the
potential impact of the Internet and other new media channels on
the travel industry, Going Places decided to offer customers access
to its products and services through an interactive TV system,
choosing to work with Sky Digital's Open service.
"Our vision was to provide customers with flexible, interactive
access to the latest holiday and travel information and more
flexibility in making contact with our call centre staff," explains
Airtours e-media operations director, Bill Budd.
Going Places worked with new-media consultancy Gray Interactive
to develop a user-friendly interface that would provide access to a
range of holiday and travel information. Equally important,
according to Budd, was the work carried out with Microsoft
solutions provider partner DAT Enterprises to create a simple
back-office application, running on Win2000, which would integrate
the company's call-centre network, its holiday database and the
Open user interface.
Phil Greenhalgh, business development manager at DAT, explains
that his company chose to develop the application on Win2000 for a
number of reasons. First, by working with Win2000, it would be able
to reuse a number of components developed in previous projects.
This was the only way in which DAT could meet the extremely short
timescales for the project laid down by Going Places, which wanted
the system up and running within six months.
On top of that, the complete Win2000 package incorporates a
number of elements that gave DAT a head start when developing the
application. These include Internet Information Server 5 and a
range of Com+ components, such as Microsoft transaction server,
Microsoft message queue and Windows terminal services. "All of
those features were available as individual items in NT 4 but they
were not well developed or integrated," Greenhalgh explains.
"Together, they took care of a lot of the communication between the
various components we had written."
The key requirement for the back-office application was to allow
travel advisors in the call centre to see exactly what the customer
browsing the Open service had been looking at. If you visit the
Going Places service on Open, you will be presented with a series
of menu options that allow you to drill down into details on
different holidays. In the higher levels of the system, information
is provided in much the same way as teletext, with a series of
screens being sent in a continuous loop. However, once customers
start making selections and requesting detailed information,
interaction becomes two-way, using the dial-up telephone link in
the set-top box. Customers can then place calls directly to the
call centre or send e-mails requesting either an e-mail response or
for a travel advisor to call at a particular time.
DAT Enterprises' solution needed to take all the information on
customer activities on the system, which is gathered by the server
- operated by Gray Interactive - running the interactive TV
application, and load it into its own SQL Server 7 database, before
presenting it to call-centre agents through a browser interface. To
allow calls to be assigned to agents and managed, the system had to
incorporate simple workflow elements, such as work queues,
follow-up prompts, transactions and the ability for advisors to
record actions and conversations. On top of that, DAT wrote a
module to accept credit card transactions and process them through
an accredited bank.
The client side of the application runs on any machine with
Internet Explorer 4 or above. DAT was confident it would deliver
acceptable performance to agents' desktops since it had already
implemented the NT 4-based client-side infrastructure at Going
Places' call centre in a previous project.
DAT was also responsible for building and testing the Win2000
server, going live on a beta version of the operating system before
switching to the release-to-manufacture version, following the
official launch of Win2000 in February. "After testing, we were
confident that the beta version was entirely stable for a
production system, and in the event it proved fine," says
Greenhalgh. "Upgrading to release-to-manufacture was also
straightforward and the system has been stable for many months." He
points out that DAT runs some of its own systems on Win2000 and,
altogether, has been extremely impressed by the new operating
system's stability.
DAT is also providing ongoing support, as the rest of the
company has not yet adopted Win2000. "We had some resistance to
Windows 2000 from the Going Places' support people," Greenhalgh
admits, "because, when we started in September 1999, Windows 2000
was still very much a product for the future and they were wary
about putting a beta release on a live system. We were able to get
them to accept the risk by taking on responsibility for support,
even though we're based 400 miles away, and that risk has been
justified, because we've had no problems."
At a group level, Airtours is still evaluating Win2000 and has
not yet made a decision about when to introduce it across the
group, although it has been impressed by the performance of the few
standalone applications, such as the interactive TV service, and
the small number of client-side implementations it has implemented
so far. "Our early experience shows that it's more stable than NT
or Windows 9x on the client," says David White, Airtours' director
of group IT.
However, says White, the group wants to take a co-ordinated
approach to the introduction of Win2000, especially given the
potential benefits of using Active Directory Services to create a
coherent directory and addressing structure across the group. "At
the moment, we're using mainly NT at the local area network level,
with each site running its own domain, and that makes sharing
information difficult," White explains. "There is the potential
with Windows 2000 to resolve those issues, so we're trying not to
let people run away with local implementations that would be
difficult to unpick and make it hard for us to reap the benefits
later on."
When it comes to the interactive TV service, the launch has been
extremely successful. Going Places is already ahead of its volume
targets for e-mail enquiries, having had several hundred contacts
even on the day the service was launched, despite the fact that it
had not been publicised. The Win2000 application should now help
the company to turn those enquiries into sales.
Carbusters.com
www.Carbusters.com was created when leading independent UK car
importers Import Marques got together with Which? Online, the
Internet arm of the Consumer's Association. Import Marques collates
information from a network of affiliated car importers on their
stocks of new, UK-specification European and Japanese cars. This
database is indexed by manufacturer, model and specification and
also includes information on import prices and lead times. Import
Marques and Which? Online agreed to offer the benefits of Import
Marques' service to Which? members, as part of the Which? 'Great
British Car Rip-off' campaign against allegedly inflated UK car
prices.
With the help of Web developer Intuitiv Internet Services,
Carbusters.com project manager Raj Bedi created a Web site that
allowed users to interrogate the car database for price and
delivery information on specific car specifications and
manufacturers. Customers could then begin the process of placing an
order using an online form. The site used the Active Server Page
technology within Microsoft's Internet Information Server, running
on Windows NT Server 4.0, to process online forms and query an SQL
Server 7.0 database.
This first site was initially made available only to Which?'s
10,000 members. Following a successful launch in November 1999,
when the system coped well with modest levels of traffic, Which?
and Import Marques decided to make the site available to the
general public.
Intuitiv consultant Cormac Murphy realised that the
infrastructure put in place to support the initial private site
would need to be improved to cope with the demands that would be
placed on it when it went public. He could have stuck with NT 4 but
decided to evaluate Win2000 because, he explains, "it was billed as
providing significant benefits over NT 4 in terms of reliability
and scalability."
According to Murphy, load tests quickly established that an
Internet Information Server running on Win2000 could cope with high
volumes of traffic. He adds that evaluation of various pre-release
versions of Win2000 on a variety of machines and other sites being
developed by Intuitiv had already demonstrated that it was a very
stable operating system. Intuitiv therefore had no hesitation in
porting the existing carbusters.com systems onto Win2000. The
launch date for the public version of carbusters.com meant Intuitiv
could move straight to the release-to-manufacture version of
Win2000, running on a 600MHz Pentium III server with 512 Mbytes
Ram.
When the revamped site was officially launched on 28 March this
year, amidst a huge media blitz, it had to cope with 5 million hits
a day in the first week, settling down to around half a million
hits a day in the longer term. Even under this kind of pressure,
Murphy says, the site coped effortlessly, without any dip in
performance, and proved extremely robust. Overall, he says, Win2000
represents a very cost-effective solution for high-volume Web
sites.
On top of that, the close integration between SQL Server,
Internet Information Server and the operating system helped
Intuitiv to create the kind of data-driven site carbusters.com was
looking for. Bedi points out that carbusters.com is also likely to
benefit in the future from the fact that Win2000 incorporates other
new technologies such as extensible mark-up language (XML).
Murphy adds that moving to Win2000 "has even made hosting and
maintaining the site easier for us, with tools for monitoring site
traffic and server performance. This has allowed us to provide
Import Marques and Which? with ongoing feedback as to the
popularity of the site and means we will be able to pre-empt any
future problems before they arise."
Carbusters.com has also benefited from Win2000's compatibility
with NT 4. This made transferring the application to Win2000
extremely quick and easy, while carbusters.com has been able to
retain its original NT 4-based back-up servers to mirror the main
site and provide a 'hot swap' facility.
According to Murphy, Intuitiv "hasn't needed to make special
arrangements to make sure the main and back-up servers communicate
properly and we are confident that the back-up servers could step
in if any problems with the primary server hardware were to
arise."
University of Leicester update
The University of Leicester was the first UK customer to deploy
Win2000 in a production environment. Computer Weekly has
previously brought you details of the University's experiences in
deploying the terminal services version of the new operating
system, when rolling Win2000 out to staff desktops and to student
machines in open access and specialist laboratories.
The phased introduction of Win2000 over the past year is
progressing quickly, with the new operating system now available on
more than 1,450 machines. The University is currently using a mix
of release-to-manufacture, release candidates and Beta 3 versions
of Win2000, although it hopes to move all machines to a single
version in the longer term. There are now more than 5,600
registered users, with around 760 users at peak log-in, and this
number is expected to rise when the new academic year begins in
September and all students switch across to the Win2000
service.
Although the new operating system is proving a strong foundation
for delivering student computing services, Leicester has
encountered a number of issues as its use of Win2000 advances. In
particular, the University has had negative experiences when
attempting to support Mac users from the same service as PC users.
This capability was seen as a major attraction of Win2000 but,
according to Peter Burnham, assistant director of the University's
Computer Centre, has created two major resource issues. First,
holding profiles in a Mac-enabled filestore causes significant
delays in logout. Second, the Mac service creates an index of all
Mac-enabled files which is retained in memory on the server; as the
number of files has grown, the size of the index has caused memory
problems. The University is therefore considering developing a
separate filestore for Mac users.
The University has also decided to store users' profiles
separately from their main filestore quota. Burnham explains that
the Win2000 quota system makes no allowance for the requirement
when saving profile updates for temporary access to extra disk
space totalling twice the user's current profile size. The
university has set its default filestore allocation at 25 Mbytes,
but a significant number of users have profiles of 8 Mbytes,
because some applications insist on storing information within the
user profile. Since users have other files in their allocated
space, there is insufficient room for the profile to be rewritten
and profile updates are lost on logout. Burnham adds that the
separate disk allocation for profiles will have a ceiling of 8
Mbytes per user and that the University will actively look at
replacing software which insists on storing information in user
profiles.
Case study: Dulwich Preparatory School
Goal
To provide the latest technology for pupils and staff while
minimising the support burden on a small IT team
Why Win2000?
- Offers a Windows 98 desktop on a thin-client
infrastructure
- Allows the same desktop to be run on thin and fat
clients
- Allows admin tasks to be delegated to users
- Minimises the support burden on a small IT team
Obstacles overcome
- Acquiring Win2000 skills and understanding implementationissues
especially relating to Active Directory Services
- Minor issues with third-party software compatibility
Conclusion
Stable desktop solution that can be administered easily by a
small IT team
Case study: Going Places
Goal
A stable and robust server to support a browser-based workflow
system
Why Win2000?
- Tight integration between operating system and
Internet
- Information Server and Com+ components providing workflow
functionality
- Stability and robustness, demonstrated during testing and in
other systems run by developer DAT
Obstacles overcome
- Resistance from the client-support team to basing a production
system on a pre-release operating system, overcome by developer DAT
assuming responsibility for server support
- Short timescales for development and implementation, tackled
through reuse of components from previous projects and use of the
Com+ components in Win2000
Conclusion
Win2000 has proved a robust platform for the back-office
operations of a new service
Case study: carbusters.com
Goal
To implement a robust and scalable Web server platform capable
of supporting a very popular site
Why Win2000?
- Greater reliability and scalability than the NT 4.0
implementation hosting a previous version of the site
- Compatibility between Win2000 and NT 4 made porting the Web
site straightforward
- close integration between Internet Information Server, SQL
Server and Win2000 supported creation of a data-driven
site
Obstacles overcome
- Rigorous stress testing to ensure Win2000 lived up to its
billing
Conclusion
A robust platform able to withstand five million hits a day when
the site was launched, with no drop in quality of service