' ; intro['806'] = 'Begin all projects with the end in mind. Use this mantra to keep your efforts focused and directed. However, it seems that a casual audit of the practices that go into corporate intranets illustrates that we still haven’t learned many of the lessons client/server taught us. Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, writes: "It’s a principle that all things are created twice, but not all creations are by conscious design." Many intranet sites out there don’t seem to have the luxury of doing it right from the start. The need to deliver solutions ASAP is the busy work that prevents us from stepping back and assessing what we’re building. ' ; intro['808'] = 'Have you ever noticed that the people who can make a decision about a $70,000-dollar-a-year staff member in 20 minutes are the same people who spend endless hours in endless meetings with countless people over the course of months deciding how to spend $50,000 on a piece of hardware or some software? Why the obsession with the buying process? First, the impact a particular technology will have on the organization is usually overestimated from the start. Second, as we’ve increasingly become an economy of knowledge workers--you know, no tangible products--buying an actual piece of hardware or software programs is a big deal. And third, we’re obsessed with the buying process because it’s simple and fun--honestly. ' ; intro['810'] = 'What type of systems did you work on five years ago? What are you working on now? What type of products/services did your organization offer five years ago? What makes money for your organization today? Chances are very good that in five years you’ll make your living delivering a product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet. Moreover, you’ll be working with products that do not exist today (can you imagine "legacy Windows applications?"). ' ; intro['812'] = 'In the Middle Ages, monks sat around and debated topics like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and whether or not Adam had a navel. These may seem like ludicrous issues today, but for those who took religion seriously in the Middle Ages, no philosophical question was left unaddressed. One of the perennial debates for network managers today is how much support staff is required to support a user. These present day techno-monks who pray at the altar of technology have replaced discussions on the nature of the divine with discussions on the salvation of the dollar. ' ; intro['814'] = 'Given the constant drone of Internet and Web media saturation that jams the airwaves these days, I can hardly blame you for being somewhat jaded. Consequently, I cannot blame you for ignoring most of the stuff either. After all, once the network infrastructure is built and a traffic-flow pattern is more or less established, the network architect’s job is to keep the network running. Despite evidence to the contrary (the number of hours a week you’re working), this job has gotten somewhat easier. The positive effect of standards and mass adoption of IP has been that applications come and go without constant intervention by network architects. From the architectural point of view, this is as the network gods intended it to be: As long as you obey the rules and conventions established for this network, you can put up any server or application you like. ' ; intro['816'] = 'When I wrote about the telecommunications deregulation act last year, I was looking forward to cost savings, better customer service and improved technologies to come--sooner than later (see "It’s the Telephone Showdown: RBOCs vs. CAPS," at www.NetworkComputing.com/702/702 walsh.html). Today, we are well past the planning stage, and these hopes still have not been realized. The rapid expansion of local access has a lot to do with the good economic times we’re having. Let’s face it, if you have to spend millions of dollars on switches and facilities, low interest rates help. Recently, Wired magazine ran a cover story in which the authors described an economic boom--a 25-year expansion. This boom, they said, could be attributed in part to a more open culture willing to take risks and absorb the costs of trying new approaches. In other words, an economy that is ready to make investments.' ; intro['818'] = 'Both corporate IS and users are under the mistaken impression that they need not pay for the cow if they can get the milk for free. This month’s RFP feature illustrates two distinct examples. First, many decision-makers are outsourcing the education and architecture process by ineffectively commingling it with the RFP process. Second, many users--with the encouragement of middleware vendors--are assuming connected and disconnected mean the same thing. We discovered this because our RFP was targeted for sales and marketing users, many of whom are laptop users on the go. The solutions suggested by most of our bidders went to incredible lengths to propagate data down to each laptop. Example One: Unrealistic Expectations for the RFP Process When I spoke with management about their procurement process, I encountered a lot of chest-beating and unrealistic expectations. I recently overheard the following: "I can get any vendor to do anything for nothing." There’s your first mistake. Next I overheard: "I use vendors for education. Let’s use this RFP process as a way to get up to speed." There’s your second mistake. Just because you agonized for five months about whether or not to upgrade to Office 97, doesn’t mean you can make an informed decision about the intranet.' ; intro['820'] = 'OK. By a show of hands, who of you out there has a valid disaster-recovery plan? Forget it--I probably wouldn’t believe you even if I could see your hands. A recent Network Computing E-Mail Poll showed that more than 40 percent of you have small (less than 24 ports) populations of dial-in ports. What’s more, the E-Mail Poll indicated that you’re in no rush to outsource these ports. Let’s extrapolate that number, for the purpose of discussion, assuming the number of WAN connections, voice and fax lines are all proportional. More than likely, you’ve come to the conscious, or unconscious, decision that you can’t afford resilience to the point of nonstop networking or a standby disaster recovery site. If this is you’re decision, it’s time to reexamine it. I know--you’re past the point of waking up in a cold sweat wondering if a flood or a riot will take you out of business, but, the fact is, an affordable disaster-recovery site strategy may already be well within your reach. ' ; intro['902'] = 'E-commerce and directory services are the plumbing of tomorrow’s Internet. As such, they demand more attention from the talented and passionate core engineering community that has brought us this far. Unfortunately, that community labors under a self-imposed separation from the applications its networks support. ' ; intro['904'] = 'You can roughly define electronic commerce as the transactions leading to the sale or other transfer of title for payment between producer and customer. Because e-commerce software has a spotty record for actually making money, financing for it seems to binary: Either you have a big customer that insists you implement a compatible system or your manager uses some form of black magic to justify the project. However, it’s apparent that the Web has generated a great deal of enthusiasm for e-commerce. The questions now are who will be the winners and what’s the winning strategy--not which vendors will succeed (unless you work for a vendor or own a lot of stock in a particular company). What opportunities does e-commerce create f or rank-and-file business organizations? How can companies that want to develop an e-commerce strategy approach the market with the right technology, make the best decisions and ultimately contribute to the bottom line?' ; intro['906'] = 'To build or to buy. Yes, it’s time to dust off that old bit of IS folklore. We know about the popularity of the Web and the well-documented successes of electronic-commerce sites--at least the PR machines have publicized them well enough. That success has driven us to wistful contemplation: Can we be the next ones to make $1 million on the Internet. But how will we sell our widgets and services over the Web? It shouldn’t be too hard. After all, the prerequisite components--corporate Web servers, databases and consumer browsers--are ubiquitous; they work well and they don’t cost an arm and a leg. Moreover, at this point everyone and his mother has a Web page. Heck, you might be up to your third or fourth version.' ; intro['908'] = 'The toughest security problems have nothing to do with packet sniffing, TCP SYN or the ping of death. Yes, securing your networks and servers is important, but securing against the people who populate that workspace may be even more important. Security is fundamentally about people--those who develop, operate and use your systems. And there are only two types of people--those who have earned your trust and those you haven’t caught yet. ' ; intro['910'] = 'Britain’s Prince Charles once referred to the National Gallery--a recent architectural addition to the London skyline--as a "a monstrous carbuncle" appearing on the nose of an old and dear friend. (Immediately after uttering that remark, he became the architecture critic most likely to appear on the front page of a tabloid.)' ; intro['912'] = 'At the end of a long day at the office, during which I had spent hours staring at interminable protocol traces, the telephone rang and I blinked for the first time in what seemed to be an hour. My back creaked as I reached for the phone.' ; intro['914'] = 'I try not to repeat myself. But you’re obviously not listening. I really need you to do the right thing and fix a glaring omission on that expensive electronic-commerce site of yours. Back in the December 1996 issue of Network Computing, I wrote "Privacy Stewardship On Your Net" (see www. nwc.com/720/720colwalsh.html). My argument then needs to be repeated today: "You have as much responsibility for the privacy of others and appropriate use of data as you have for any other facet of the network infrastructure. For example, you probably have, or at least you should have, an explicit plan and policy for network security in place, likewise for the basics such as data backup. As network professionals, we spend our professional lives as the stewards of other people’s data. The popularity of the Web exposes the fact that we have overlooked our most basic responsibility: the privacy of data."' ; intro['916'] = 'When your resources are stretched to the limit but your ambitions point toward the stars, the $64,000 question is, "What do I outsource?" My question to you is, "How will you make your outsourcing a successful venture?' ; intro['918'] = 'Over the past few years I’ve heard the litany "good folks are hard to find" too often. Many managers rate finding qualified individuals as their most serious challenge. In fact, some have heard it and said it so often that they now simply accept that finding a qualified individual is an insurmountable problem. But if it’s so important, why is there such a lack of solutions? And why do we accept this defeatist attitude?' ; intro['920'] = 'Over the past few months, I’ve grown to appreciate the elegance of both Java’s architecture and implementation--an appreciation born from my experiences with both Java and Visual Basic.Corporate development managers face a development-tool choice every four years or so. At this point in the cycle, the most likely candidates are Java and VB. Looking back at previous cycles, we saw business developers switch their technology from COBOL, for example, to Clipper to PowerBuilder to VB. Each tool offered value given the technical and business challenges at the time. But at the end of the process only the tool had changed; the programmers remained stagnant, with the same old approaches simply translated into a new language.' ; intro['922'] = 'A first-time e-commerce project manager informs management that after due diligence, package selection and integration, enabling the company’s Web site for e-commerce will take six months and cost approximately $400,000. He then notes that the only thing left to do is to inform the network group. But what can the network group really add to the project, he wonders? Maybe a new T1 line? Well, he has already budgeted for that, to the tune of $1,000 per month and 30-days’ notice to install. All in all, he anticipates no problems.' ; intro['1001'] = 'It’s a new year and I’m looking forward to the months ahead. I’m also pondering the more-distant future--curious about which issues I’ll be addressing in this column in the year 2000, when we’ll all look back to gauge our successes and failures with our much publicized turn-of-the-century challenges. However, my first New Year’s resolution is not to cover Y2K issues. I’ve always considered this exercise the IT equivalent of dumpster diving--trying to find the gold in other people’s trash. Furthermore, this is the year of the big four-O for me and I’ve promised to spend it proactively. In this column, you’ll find my insights into today’s business-to-business challenges.' ; intro['1003'] = 'Given the necessities of a magazine production schedule, I typically write my column a few weeks before its publication. This lead time has its constraints, the worst of which is that it’s risky to make bold predictions; with the pace of change these days, new developments affecting my pronouncements may well occur between the time the column goes to press and the time you read it. This is especially true with a discussion of ever-fluid areas such as Internet stocks. However, in the spirit of living without a safety net, I’m going to take a stab at such future gazing, because the movement of serious money into Internet stocks has big implications for enterprise sites.' ; intro['1005'] = 'My previous column addressed the importance of adding value to B2B (business-to-business) sites by taking some cues from the business-to-consumer side. I pointed out that your search to add value in any way--and by this I did not mean simply repackaging existing enterprise applications--would turn your users into consumers, and consumers demand choices. I also discussed the "shrinking margin" effect of Internet trading on financial markets. For more proof of diminishing margins, consider the insurance market. To compete on the Internet, companies have had to cut prices to ensure prime positioning on a search engine’s results page. Traditional brokers have had to match those prices, and so for them, life insurance has become a service rather than a revenue generator.' ; intro['1007'] = 'Despite the enabling nature of open networks and the explosion of Internet users and uses, the pace of application development has been decidedly slow. It’s not much easier to develop an enterprise-class application now than it was 10 years ago, and there’s little reason to believe that’s going to change any time soon. It’s hard to imagine drawing a geometric line on a chart and calling it "IT Productivity Gains" without provoking belly laughs.' ; intro['1009'] = 'There is a lot of interest in, and even more confusion over, XML--what it is and how to prepare for it. Is XML a standard? A new way to format Web pages? Yet another language to code? None of the above? The answer to each of these questions is "sort of." To boil down the concept to one sentence, XML is like an API for potentially every Web site.' ; intro['1011'] = 'No one pops out of the womb thinking in Boolean terms.In fact, surfing the Web contributes to an attention span so short that it precludes thinking of any sort. (Uh...hmmm, now where was I? Oh, yeah...) No matter how hard you try, you will never get that site design just right. The amount of real feedback from customers and potential customers is minuscule compared to the number of users and general traffic. All your bright ideas about increasing interactivity have become entries in that great Web dictionary in the sky under the definition of "broken link." These realities make life miserable for site designers and the people who fund them.' ; intro['1013'] = 'When my wife, Julie, asks me what I’m writing about in my column, I usually offer a much too detailed answer, greeted with a "that’s nice" from her. When I began describing XML, I said that it makes it easier for organizations to agree on standards for the exchange of data. "You want agreement?" she responded. "Get those kids to agree to go to bed."' ; intro['1015'] = 'Instead of all their hand-wringing about client security, operators of consumer Web sites should implement support for client certificates, thereby replacing or enhancing the registration process. And instead of waiting for the user to obtain a client certificate, ISPs should just issue one when the user signs up. Client certificates are no less secure than the consumer authentication methods used today. CA (Certificate Authority) and e-business sites should provide incentives for users to obtain stronger certificates as needed.' ; intro['914f2'] = 'Managers of any IS department in any size company are under constant pressure to keep systems operational, effective and updated. Two fundamental business questions constantly arise: Can we get it done for less money? And can we make more money through our current efforts? Sometimes the answer is: Yes, if we outsource the operation.' ; intro['netdesign'] = 'You will succeed in building fault-tolerant networked systems only if you have a certain attitude. The incident that gave me that attitude happened when I was eight years younger, about fifteen pounds lighter, with about 150 feet of air between my feet and the ground.' ; intro['917f2'] = 'If you’re the manager of a proposed new e-commerce site, you have to take the good news with the bad. The good news is that there’s still lots of opportunity for growth. The bad news is that you have no room for mistakes.' ; intro['818f1'] = 'Put yourself in my shoes. I’m the chief technology officer at Network Computing’s mythical AppLogistics Inc., and I represent an international group of people with different companies and different names, selling different products to different customers with different systems, in different states, regions and countries. Our corporate imperative is to ensure that these disparate entities present a single, unified image to the market. I’m the guy who has to sell this to them or else jam it down their throats. I’m the one telling them they have to become a new sales and marketing organization. What’s the quickest way to get them up and running? What’s the best way to support them? An intranet, that’s the ticket! With an intranet, you point your browser at your new server and away you go. We decided we’d issue an RFP for a packaged application and Web infrastructure. Then we’d issue a second one with AT&T, MCI or some large Internet service provider (ISP) for the virtual private network (VPN). They’ll mail our users the browser disks, they’ll handle the setup and user support. Bang! we’re up. No problem, right? Well, let me tell you what really happened.' ; intro['1009ws3'] = 'The success of e-commerce is based on standards, such as TCP/IP and HTTP, as well as low-cost Internet access. But more important, its triumph lies with the protocols involved in exchanging money for goods and services. These payment protocols define electronic commerce, distinguishing true e-commerce sites from their information-only, "brochureware" counterparts. A payment protocol does not move data; it moves money. The headers and provided services of these protocols are layered on top of underlying data- and link-layer protocols.' ; intro['1010'] = 'For all the media hype and the flood of investment money, e-commerce is still in its infancy. A motivated and technically advanced consumer can buy uncomplicated products online. And though it’s possible to purchase sophisticated products that require online configuration or comparison shopping, doing so usually means negotiating a difficult learning curve. Merchants are finding that unless they’re wedded to a given portal, establishing an independent e-commerce site is liable to take more time and money than they expected. To succeed, they will not only have to publish a "buy now" button, but also carefully consider the economics, merchandise selection and technology choices associated with e-commerce.' ; intro['1001f1'] = 'Is your network equipped to survive unforeseen calamities? Our (RFP) Request for Proposals asked vendors to submit a business-continuity plan for disaster recovery. Comdisco, Exodus and IBM responded with extensive, distinct solutions for rescuing your business from the brink of catastrophe. We evaluate their strategies to help you identify the best recovery options for your organization.' ; intro['904f2'] = 'Perhaps PhotoDisc’s Pearce sums it up best. A successful commerce site, she says, has "roots in all your businesses, it’s not just an isolated sales channel and you don’t want it to be. You need to develop awareness in other divisions in how they can support online initiatives."' ; intro['1016'] = 'Java’s breadth of support and relative ease of development have made it the language of choice for many businesses. The Web applications of tomorrow, such as XML data streams and complex high-volume transactions, require robust server-based solutions.' ; function onLinkClick(link) { var href = link.href ; if ( href == null ) { href = link.attributes['href'].nodeValue ; } document.getElementById("intro").innerHTML = intro[link.id] + 'Read more below...'; document.getElementById("intro").selectedId = link.id ; document.getElementById("article").src = link.attributes['href'].nodeValue ; } function onMouseOver(link) { if ( document.getElementById("intro").selectedId == link.id ) { return ; } link.className = 'titleSelected' ; } function onMouseOut(link) { link.className = 'title' ; }