## MS BackOffice Unleashed

- Information Needs for Administrators and Users
- Publications
- Microsoft Informational CDs
- The World Wide Web
- Newsgroups
- Users groups
- List Servers
- Summary

#
— 46 —

##
Resources for BackOffice

BackOffice is a broad product line that is getting broader every day. New products and upgrades are going to continue at a furious pace. Add to that service packs, upgrades to drivers, and new drivers and you have quite a task just to keep up with the pace of technology. There is no easy solution to this problem, because it is somewhat analogous to drinking from a fire hose. There are some resources, however, that can help you with the task of keeping up.

This chapter covers some of my favorite sources of information. Because you all have slightly different sets of needs and different ways that you like to get information, a broad sampling of sources is in order.

###
Information Needs for Administrators and Users

It might be useful to go over some of the information needs that I have run across working with BackOffice servers. Figure 46.1 illustrates some of the basic question areas that might come up. Some of the areas where you might need additional information include the following:

- Detailed information about new products that have been introduced
- Information on service packs and what they can do for your operating system
- Detailed information about the architecture of the products that you have installed
- Detailed operational information for the products that you are supporting
- Problem solving and bug fixes
- Information on interfacing your applications with BackOffice servers
- Information about hardware that is on the market that you might use in an upgrade
- Information about vendor product directions
- List of jobs for experts in the Windows NT and BackOffice environments

FIGURE 46.1. Basic BackOffice information areas.

###
Publications

The first tool that you can use in your quest for knowledge includes traditional print publications. This book is one example of such a printed resource. You might consider books that provide more detailed information on specific topics, such as Windows NT Server or SQL Server database administration. It always amazes me when I go to my favorite local bookstore and find how large the section on computer books is and how it always seems to be packed. It's a tribute to the pace of change in the computer industry. If you are not working almost every day to keep up, you are going to fall way behind and forever be confined to modestly paying jobs working on "legacy" systems.

Books have the advantage of being able to provide a lot of detail. Authors and editors spend a lot of time preparing the various sections, graphics, and all the other details. Magazines have the advantage of being quick to produce, however. They are distributed on a routine basis (weekly, monthly, and so forth) and therefore are a great resource for the latest breaking information. They also include some insightful articles and interesting commentary. These magazines vary in focus from those that try to cover the computer industry in general to those that focus on a very specific product (BackOffice, for example). Although I am not here to make any endorsements, here are some of the more popular and topical magazines for your consideration:

- PCWeek
- DBMS
- Microsoft Systems Journal
- Windows NT Magazine
- BackOffice Magazine
- Newsletters from the Cobb Group
- Information Week

###
Microsoft Informational CDs

One of the things that you might notice when you purchase computer software these days is that you do not get a lot of books with the products. Although this makes for a great market for books such as this one, it also leaves some holes in the area of detailed technical information that were typically included in the reference documents of yesteryear. It just seems to cost too much to put out these long-winded technical volumes to everyone when very few people actually get down to this low level of technical detail. One of the common solutions to this information need is to publish CD-ROMs on a routine basis that delve into the more arcane subjects related to a computer product.

Figure 46.2 shows the information from one such CD-ROM product. It comes from the Visual C++ CD that Microsoft sends quarterly to developers who have subscribed to the Microsoft Developers Network. Here you will find all sorts of technical details about the products. The example that I chose focuses on the section on using ODBC with the Visual C++ tool, as in the case of an application that you were interfacing with a SQL Server database.

FIGURE 46.2. Sample documentation CD-ROM.

Another subscription product that might be of interest to the more general BackOffice community would be the Technet CD subscription program. The focus here is on the Microsoft products and technologies (that is, COM and DCOM). It is a good resource both for learning the technologies and also for troubleshooting when problems arise. This program uses a tree and book view display similar to that shown in Figure 46.2. I have even installed this product in the CD drive on a server for use by the entire network. CD drives are getting relatively cheap these days, and it is a great way to distribute only the most current information.

###
The World Wide Web

My favorite source of information is the World Wide Web. Why am I so enthusiastic about his medium when it comes to system support? Not too many years ago, I was quite proud of the set of files that I maintained with vendor product documentation. I religiously sent for information on magazine reader service cards for products that I might need to integrate into one of my projects. My goal was to be able to pull out the product literature when we had to prepare that quick turn-around proposal and then merely confirm pricing.

This system did work, but it became a burden to maintain. I spent a lot of time filing the information that I received. I organized my information by vendor. Sometimes, however, I wished that I had the information by product category (tape drives, for example), because I had trouble remembering what some of the smaller vendors actually sold. I also had trouble keeping track of when I received all the information. It seemed as if I had to work hard to keep refreshing the literature, especially in light of the rapid change in products and pricing that goes on in the computer industry (who would buy a 386/33 PC for $2,500 today!).

One of the first serious uses of the Web by businesses, especially those in the computer industry, was marketing. They realized that with the way they changed their product lines and pricing, it was almost impossible to keep their clients up-to-date. They also had the advantage that computer techies where among the first users of the Web, so they could reasonably argue that their Web pages were reaching the buying audience. Anyway, it is a great way of doing business when researching and integrating computer systems. If you assume that vendors keep their Web pages up-to-date, which I have found to be the case, you are guaranteed to get the latest information whenever you need it. You do not have to listen to salespeople trying to make a sale or answer all the calls to see whether you are going to buy anything after you receive the literature.

What is my process for finding information using the Web? For many vendors, I already know their Web addresses (URLs in Internet parlance). For example, www.microsoft.com, www.oracle.com, and www.intel.com are pretty easy to remember (www in front and com on the back). I will usually try to see whether the company has a Web site that fits this pattern when I am trying to look up information. If I do not succeed in finding the simple pattern (because the parent company has a name that is different from the common product name or someone else got that Internet name first), I will try one of the Internet search engines to find the appropriate page. Some of the common search engines can be found at the following addresses:

- www.yahoo.com
- www.webcrawler.com
- www.lycos.com

These engines typically have a box in which you would enter the search criteria. Suppose, for example, that I wanted to find the address for Hewlett Packard printers. I would type Hewlett Packard in as my search criteria and then touch the search button. I would then get a number of matching responses back in a display similar to Figure 46.3. The nice feature about this result is that the underlined lines are actually links to the pages themselves. You can just click on the underlined text to go to the Web site that is described. It is a very easy way to navigate to an unknown location.

FIGURE 46.3. Sample search engine results page.

Once you find the address of the site that you want, you will typically be taken to the main page for the company. After that, you have the opportunity to follow links to other pages at the site that are of interest to you. You can find general Microsoft information, information about various products, and other literature. Figure 46.4 shows a sample of one of the pages in BackOffice section of Microsoft’s Web site. As you can see, there is a wealth of information available.

FIGURE 46.4. Sample BackOffice Web page.

Another good use of the Web is to download the latest drivers and other products. Figure 46.5 shows a sample page on the Microsoft site and some of the new products and drivers for existing products that you can download. Examples here include an evaluation version of the latest release of SQL Server, the initial release of the Internet Information Server (for NT 3.51 systems that did not have IIS bundled with them as NT 4.0 systems do), and a set of ODBC drivers. Again, once you learn the easy point-and-click interface of the Web, you can navigate to other sites and pages. You can also download software with a single click. It can be a very powerful tool, because there is already a great deal of product support on the Web and it continues to increase.

FIGURE 46.5. Sample page on the Microsoft site showing new products and drivers that you can download.

A final note is that many third-party vendors provide a good deal of support through the Web similar to the Microsoft examples that have been covered so far. Obviously, some are better than others. However, even on the poorer sites you can usually get basic product information and numbers to call if you have questions that are not answered on the Web site. You never know until you try. Heck, I even downloaded a specific MPEG driver for an IBM notebook for the Windows 95 operating system in a matter of minutes that helped me get a system out in the field in an afternoon. Imagine how long it would have taken if I had to send for the disk.

###
Newsgroups

Web pages are a really great source of information. However, they tend to be a one-way communications vehicle. The provider determines the content and you review it. There is often far more content than you would want to see, so you can usually find what you want. What do you do when you have a really unusual or specific problem, however?

One answer to this dilemma is the Internet Newsgroups. There are an enormous number of newsgroups out there with topics ranging from beer making to social commentary (there are a lot of commentary pages for frustrated individuals). Anyway, this is an interactive medium where you post a question or comment in a newsgroup that is devoted to the subject matter that you want to discuss. The goal here is to get a review of what you write by a large number of people, some of whom are experts and others who are amateurs. In most cases, you can find someone who has the same or a similar problem and can provide you with some insight into your situation.

Figure 46.6 shows a partial listing of the newsgroups that might be of interest to BackOffice users. Best of all, most newsgroup readers will provide you with a list of newsgroups that are available on your news server. You do not have to look at the list provided in a book that was published several months or years ago. Go out and look at the list in the comp.os and comp.database sections to see what is currently available. Newsgroups often split up to reduce the number of messages that a given individual has to monitor. Other times, new ones are formed and old ones die out. Check what is currently available using your browser (which is what I was doing in Figure 46.6).

FIGURE 46.6. Some newsgroups of interest to BackOffice users.

A few words of caution are in order about newsgroup postings. This is an interesting world subculture where you get some of the best minds in the business. You also get a lot of lonely people and some people that are downright arrogant. Here are some suggestions for those of you who are new to newsgroups:

- Carefully evaluate the responses that you receive to questions. Usually, you will get someone with a high level of experience who can really save you a lot of time. Occasionally, you will get people who just want to see their name on a list of postings. If a response does not make sense to you and is not corroborated by other responses, you might want to just ignore it.
- Be careful about using inflammatory tones in your postings. There are a number of people out there who are just looking for something to gripe about and this will distract people from the business at hand (answering your question).
- You might want to study the etiquette of the Net before you deviate from simple technical question and response postings. There are a lot of people who are sensitive about job postings (even though you see them all of the time in the technical newsgroups for products that are in demand) and topics that do not relate to the designated subject matter of the newsgroup. It's a good idea to read the newsgroup for a while to see what is generally accepted and what is not.

Newsgroups can be a very powerful tool. They can give you access to other people out there who are doing work similar to your own. Many of these people might have seen the problem before and may have actually solved it. An amazing number of people will take time to help someone whom they do not even know in response to a posting on the newsgroup. (I like that flavor of community that is found on the Net.) Perhaps you have more in common with a BackOffice administrator in a foreign country than you do with the politicians who are running your own country. . .

###
Users groups

A local alternative for those who are not connected to the Internet or who like interpersonal communications is a local users group for NT and/or BackOffice users. What users groups are available in your area? The best way to find out would be to call your local Microsoft representatives or monitor the newsgroups and list servers to see whether there are any in your area. If you know of several people who do work similar to your own, you might want to form your own users group, local contacts who may be willing to have you call them for advice when you are in real trouble.

Microsoft NT and BackOffice users groups are relatively new and rare. Here are a few ideas from the local Oracle users group that I belong to—it shows what a group that has been around for a little while can do:

- Have speakers from the product vendors come in to discuss new products. You would be amazed at the number of sales and technical people who will even fly in from out of town if you tell them that you have a fair-sized group of people who actually work in the environment of interest.
- Provide sessions where members bring up problems that they are challenged with and see whether others have any suggestions for these problems.
- Have members present their evaluations of new products that might be of interest to other members. This is often better than having vendor representatives come in, because your members will often give you more candid opinions about the products.
- Have members provide feedback on all those major conferences that you would like to attend, but there is no budget or time.

###
List Servers

Finally, there is an Internet tool that lets you routinely receive electronic mail on a given subject. You send an e-mail to the appropriate list server administrator who then adds your name to his or her distribution list (this is usually an automated process where you type the word subscribe in the text or heading of your message and it figures out your e-mail address). You then continue to receive mailings until you tell them to stop your subscription. In effect, these list servers are the equivalent of electronic magazines that get delivered to your electronic mail inbox as opposed to your paper mailbox.

Where do you find out the list servers that are available? You will often find articles discussing them in the appropriate Internet newsgroups. You can also find references to a number of them on various Web pages while you are surfing around. There are several newsgroups on Windows NT and BackOffice that are provided by Microsoft. To subscribe, go to the Microsoft home page and surf around until you find them (they are relatively easy to find once you get the knack of surfing the Web; they move around as the Web pages are designed, so polish up your surfing skills).

###
Summary

This chapter provides you with a start on finding resources that will help you administer and use your BackOffice environment to its maximum potential. The use of Internet resources was stressed in this discussion because that is a current emphasis of Microsoft. It enables you to get up-to-date information and software whenever you need them. Traditional printed materials (such as this book) provide you with insight and information about the products. Most of the people that I have come across (even computer types) tend to prefer printed material for commentary, general discussions, and step-by-step instructions. The electronic forms of media tend to be better when you need up-to-date information, software to download, or answers to a very specific technical question. Try out these various information sources when you have the time so that you know exactly where to go and how to use these tools when problems arise and you are desperate for information.