Web-site Development Tools

[John M. Morris]

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Carl Snow wrote:

> encourages the use of IIS another MS product.  Like most thing from MS each
> product is designed to work very well with other MS products thus pulling an
> organization into the MS orbit.  There may be times that MS has the best
> product for a particular solution but at this time I personally do not feet
> that Front Page is the best solution for our particular situation.

Exactly, let a single piece of their stuff ever get in the door and you
will forever be fighting it's takeover and destruction of your computing
environment.  The bad part is some of the individual parts aren't horrid,
some are even pretty good in fact, but they keep sucking in more of the
bad stuff as versions roll on.  And just like a single dandelion is not a
bad thing in and of itself, if you don't quickly yank it out of your
garden you will soon have real problems. 

So far the evil weed has it's roots (the OS) in all of our patron machines
and most of the staff workstations, but we have for the most part kept
Office/FP/etc and their expensive upgrade merry-go-round from getting a
foothold and the server room is M$ Free with the exception of a single
Logicraft LAN-CD box with DOS underneath.  Some efforts at driving it back
are even showing hopeful signs, we now have some staff stations happily
running Applixware on X.  If I can manage to get Books In Print and a
couple other critical apps running via emulation or something most of the
staff machines can be converted over, which will of course translate into
fewer "HELP" calls.  And even when (yes I'm honest enough to say when
instead of if.  St Murphy, the patron Saint of computing, would nuke our
server tonight if I said UNIX boxen never have a problem <grin>) a call
does come in I can fix it from my workstation, which will be even more
important as we open branches at longer distances. 

John M.      http://www.dtx.net/~jmorris         This post is 100% M$ Free!
Geek code 3.0:GCS C+++ UL++++$ P+++ L+++ W+ N++ w-- Y+ 5+++ R tv- b++ e* r%
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