Background

Bell Labs is biased towards open systems and publicly available standards. As the inventors of UNIX, we have a large and stable UNIX environment. When PCs first appeared they were often castigated to separate networks for security reasons and we required users to support themselves. Demand for official support grew at the same time as self administered machines were causing havoc. Finally we decided to give them official support to limit their damage. As NT grew in popularity in the industry, our customers needed to use it and we integrated it into our environment.

Our users (whom we call ``customers'' [Smallwood]) expect us to provide certain services and leave them alone to be self-sufficient for selecting their own tools, etc. We have a very technical customer base. For example, we provide file service but they select their own development environment. Since they preferred this with their UNIX environment, we adopted the same policy as we began official support of PCs. There are three categories of services we provide to our PC users.

The first category of services is related to deployment. We install new PC hardware, load the operating system, connect it to the network, and install and configure all applications. We also handle all account creation/deletion services and manage the NT Domains. These are outside of the scope of this paper, but are touched on as appropriate.

The second category is the main desktop applications that we provide. These include office automation, e-mail, calendar, web browser, web publishing tools, and access to UNIX compute servers (via X windows and telnet).

The third category is the ``back end'' centralized services we provide such as file storage (with access from NT or UNIX), backups and restores, printing, netnews (bulletin board system), web servers (intranet and external), and Internet access.