The Honeywell Technology Center is primarily a research and development center for the Honeywell Corporation. The IS department at HTC supports a mix of administrative assistants, managers, and engineers. We are currently undergoing a large shift in computing environment, since we were primarily users of Apple and Sun systems in the past, and are experiencing a large influx of NT based systems.

This has proved difficult in several respects - there have been needs to share resources between the UNIX and NT systems, for which we have largely found solutions. Additionally, we are currently running these as completely seperate administrative domains, which has proven to be a difficult issue. Email between the two worlds has also proved problematic, partly because some of us favor shifting entirely to standards based email, while others prefer the Microsoft offerings. We are currently working on many small research projects to smooth over some of these problems. Issues we are working on include the following:

a. Implementation of platform-independent email delivery - primarily based on IMAP. What do we do about all of the email with Microsoft Word enclosures that get sent to people with Suns on their desks?

b. Implementation of platform-independent directory services - how do we merge the Microsoft-specific implementations with, for example, LDAP?

c. Single login domains - what is the best solution for this between UNIX and NT systems. We are currently looking seriously at kerberos, in anticipation of NT 5.

d. File sharing - we are currently using a mix of Samba servers and Network Appliance file servers to meet the needs of our NT customers who need to share files with UNIX.

e. The price of UNIX boxes that people buy for their desktops continues to drop. The price of the PC's that people actually buy within our organization keeps going up, and nobody wants a 2-year-old PC sitting on their desks. It appears that the total cost of ownership for PC's is considerably higher than the UNIX boxes. Yet everyone seems convinced that they are saving money by moving to NT? What are the reasons for this belief?

Steve Hanson
Honeywell Technology Center
MN65-3410
3660 Technology Dr.
Minneapolis, MN 55418
(612)951-7596
Fax (612)951-7438
shanson@htc.honeywell.com
http://www.htc.honeywell.com