Written By Larry Lee April 1997

Alright, I know I brag on Microsoft alot. No, I'm truly not employed by them nor am I getting commissions, kickbacks, discounts, soft-dollars, or the like.

Yes, Office 97 is buggy. Yes there were some pretty serious security bugs found in IE 3.0.

BUT <G>, they still produce very competitive all around product. They have a knack for appealing to the masses as it relates to automating our daily tasks. As I've said before, from the simplest tasks for the mom and pop shop to the most sophisticated tasks for the fortune 100 company.

In this issue of shoptalk I want to exclaim my excitement on how the latest tools (not just Microsoft's) have brought Client Server computing out of the league of big dollar/ proprietary back end to any desktop with a browser.

How? I never thought you'd ask.

The one way we at IRBF have wrapped our arms around is through these Server components:

 

Windows NT 4.0 server with IIS 3.0

or Windows NT 4.0 workstation and MS Peer Web Services

or Windows 95 and MS Personal Web Server.

Active Server Pages

ODBC 3.0

And through these Client components:

Windows 95, IE 3.0 and Crystal Reports Active X Web Viewer.

I'll use Windows 95 and MS Personal Web Server as the explanation because it's easy to picture upscaling to NT to accomplish Client/Server computing.

Let's say you're a Food Wholesale Distributor with 100 employees. Let's say you have an office in NY, Boston, and LA with about 30 employees each.

Since the Microsoft Personal Webserver for Windows 95 will allow up to 500 connections, we can set up the server in Boston, configure IP on all workstations in all locations, design a database application using Microsoft's new Visual InterDev. The database can be any common ODBC driven engine such as MS Access for small databases or Visual FoxPro for Medium to large databases, or MS SQL Server for larger mission critical applications.

All the employees need is a browser with an MS Dial Up Networking for those who are off site from the Network in Boston where Personal Web Server is setup on an Ethernet backbone, and Crystal Reports Active X control for getting user-definable information out of the system.

Yes it's that simple and we at IRBF are full throttle for it.

Please see our Sample Application.