RE: Gartner Group: DO NOT USE IIS!

In all seriousness: Microsoft Office and Outlook (not Express).
Also, why buy/use another web server that is not point and click friendly
when Microsoft provides one for "free"?

[Devil's advocate]
I understand and share your concerns; however, our company are under a
strict corporate mandate to run Microsoft Products (TM). Virtually all of
the IT staff is trained on Microsoft. You do not get the strong
interoperability between products that admins and users are used to unless
you are running Microsoft Products. Introducing *NIX into the equation
brings learning curves, growing pains, and redesign of key infrastructure
that our corporate management is not willing to undertake. The only *NIX (I
think) systems we have run our DNS core and firewalling, and those support
personnel are outsourced, not in-house.

We do not get official corporate IT support for the AS/400s (a rare breed in
our corporation). I am a programmer, not a system administrator. However, we
(myself and two others) have enough resources and experience to be our own
system administrators. In the next few years we will be fighting to keep our
AS/400 to run JDE. (Corporate already has an enterprise license for running
JDE on NT.)

The predominant reasons I run Windows at work are 1) corporate mandate, 2)
Microsoft Office & Outlook, and 3) IBM Client Access. If I am to be fully
productive at work, I must have Office equivalents with full functionality.
Star Office does a decent job. However, we need better Powerpoint, Access,
and Project interoperability on other platforms. Somebody please show me an
equivalent to Outlook that provides Outlook's functionality (email, shared
calendaring, shared task lists, collaboration features). IBM should take the
initiative and develop a full-featured Client Access suite (emulator,
fully-featured file upload/download, printer emulation, and Ops Nav) for
*NIX, Mac, etc. Only when these things are accomplished can I even start
thinking about suggesting a move from Windows. My concerns here are the
other concerns raised whenever I mention Linux, etc. (Not to mention
Autocad, Catia, Mainsaver, Citrix, and numerous other packages we use on a
daily basis.)

Corporate management must change if we are to reduce the costs of these
viral/worm attacks, and get better control of our TCO and licensing issues
WRT Microsoft Products. However, until someone in the position sees the
light of other (non-MS) solutions and is agreeable to their implementation,
the current situation will not change.

Loyd

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Lovelady [mailto:dlovelady@dtcc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 8:40 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Gartner Group: DO NOT USE IIS!



Hi, all:

Quoting Gartner
     To protect against Nimda, Microsoft recommends
     installing numerous patches and service packs on
     virtually every PC and server running IE, IIS Web
     servers or the Outlook Express e-mail client. As
     the earlier Code Red worm showed, many servers and
     PCs running IIS Web server processes may not be obvious
     since they may be run as personal Web servers on the
     intranet but still be exposed to the Internet.
End quote

Ummm... I have a slightly different suggestion.  For those applications
where AS/400 may not be a good fit, or may just be too expensive to
implement there....

Why patch MS to make it kinda-sorta reliable for the next few minutes?  Why
use MS at all?  Why does our user community and those who make the
decisions even CONSIDER putting up with the expense and problems of
trouble-prone MS products?

All of this stuff and much more is available for Linux and other flavors of
Unix, and at prices that should scare the dickens out of Macro$loth
(frequently $0.00; invariably less than MS).  Also, have those
decision-making people not been watching the salary costs of MS "CEs" vs. a
good System Administrator on ANY other platform?
   Number of unix systems impacted by IIS threats: 0.
   Number of unix systems impacted by the Code Red virus: 0

Dennis Lovelady
Accenture