Products that touched our hearts and souls
We all come to the Windows NT table with our own agendas and our own
baggage. Although we work with NT, we are all different; each of us is the sum
of our unique life experiences. Therefore, when you ask a group of industry
professionals--in this case, the contributing editors of Windows NT Magazine--to
pick the best products we encountered in 1996, you get...well, you get a lot of
different opinions! Fortunately, this diversity makes the list of NT products
that we like truly interesting--it has something for everyone and illustrates
NT's versatility.
Our picking so many different products highlights an important development
in the industry: The market now abounds with NT products--a major change from
only a year ago. When we launched this magazine in the fall of 1995, we worried
that we wouldn't find enough products to keep filling the review section of our
magazine. Today, we receive products from every corner of the industry--we have
rack after rack of storage shelves jammed full of products awaiting review.
Software developers and hardware manufacturers are rushing to the NT market with
unbridled lust and blind ambition.
We picked the products that touched our hearts and souls, the products
that thrilled us to our technical marrow. Chances are good that you won't agree
with some of our selections, but that's OK--the NT table is big and round, and
everyone's views are welcome.
Microsoft's Exchange Client
Two years ago, email was a nice thing to have. Today, email is an absolute must! I
receive a lot of messages, and I'm hardly ever in one place for very long;
accessing my email from the road, the Windows NT Magazine Lab, or my
office must work first time, every time. Enter Microsoft Exchange. First,
Exchange keeps all the data on a central server, which frees up precious disk
space on my laptop. If I need to store sensitive information on my personal
system, Exchange lets me. Add in digital signatures and encryption to safeguard
the latest gossip and automatic synchronization of data whether I'm online or
offline, and you start to scratch the surface of why I like the Exchange client.
The set of tools that the Exchange client offers is better than any other
email package I've used. My favorite is the Inbox Assistant tool. With Inbox
Assistant, I can intelligently file incoming messages to appropriate folders.
Furthermore, Inbox Assistant can notify me of important messages in a variety of
ways.
—Tim Daniels
Chief Technology Officer
Microsoft's Exchange Server 4.0
The other half of the email equation is Exchange Server. We get a lot of mail at
Windows NT Magazine, and we need to verify all message transfers.
Exchange Server lets you keep a history of sent and received messages by server,
and you can search them by author, recipient, date, and so forth. Because the
server (rather than the client) stores information by default, I don't have to
worry about backing up my messages; message backup is part of the routine backup
of all data. You also get public folders that let you exchange information with
other Exchange users (and soon, with anyone using a Web browser) in a
one-to-many fashion.
Form support is another useful feature of Exchange Server. You can just do
so many cool things with forms! Tight integration with Microsoft Schedule+
rounds out the overall appeal. The ability to administer Exchange from one
interface makes this messaging platform a real enterprise player.
—Jonathan Chau
Contributing Editor
Iomega's Jaz Drive
It's big, it's removable, it's fast, and it's green. It's Iomega's 1GB Jaz drive, and I think I'm in love. As applications get larger and larger, disk space becomes a valued
commodity. Even if price is no object, physical space
is--most desktop machines have only a handful of available drive bays.
The solution to this storage problem? Removable storage. It lets you insert and
remove media cartridges as needed.
The Jaz drive is available as an internal unit and an external unit, both
of which connect to a SCSI adapter. The external unit includes a
SCSI-to-parallel adapter, which lets you use the drive on machines without SCSI
controllers.
Using Winchester hard drive technology, the Jaz boasts performance
comparable to standard hard disks. Using Windows NT's Performance Monitor
(Perfmon), I clocked data transfer on the external Jaz (running off an Adaptec
2940 SCSI adapter) at an average speed of 2.5MB per second (MBps). In contrast,
the Quantum Fireball hard drives in the system averaged a data transfer rate of
3MBps. Seek times are equally impressive. In short, the Jaz is fast enough to
use as a primary hard drive, rather than as a backup device.
The Jaz has only this downside: The price of the entire ensemble (the drive
plus the free cartridge) is a bit steep compared to more conventional forms of
storage. But if you buy another cartridge at about $120 ($99 each if purchased
in volume), you end up saving money vis-à-vis purchasing two 1GB hard
disks.
Meg for meg and dollar for dollar, the Jaz drive is probably the most
useful piece of hardware I've ever purchased. After all, something is awfully
empowering about holding a 1GB cartridge in your hand.
—Jonathan Chau
Contributing Editor
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