Windows NT Magazine recently asked two of the leading figures in Telemac's Debit Technology about implementing the project. Greg McGregor is Telemac's director of software planning, and John Dismuke is Telemac's director of MIS/communications. Here's what they had to say.
Q: What did you like about the project's implementation?
Greg: It was easy. I've spent years under Unix and nothing was ever this easy. It works as you expect and is very stable. Having choices for development tools was nice. Unix tools are typically too expensive and few and far between. Telephony let us share devices with the system and create a remote service unit for our debit phones.
John: I was already familiar with NT. It has security features and ease of use that you can't get anywhere else.
Q: What didn't you like about the project's implementation?
Greg: With the telephony, a lot of setup and research goes into running TAPI. I didn't like that at all. That tells me just that much more can go wrong. It would have been nicer to have TAPI broken up differently through some C++ classes or derivations.
John: Nothing. So far, the system has been running flawlessly.
Q: What would you have done differently on the project?
Greg: At this point, nothing. It was a home-run success. NT offered everything we needed--reliably without mystery.
John: Nothing. The biggest problem was making the decision to go from Unix to NT. We are, however, in the process of implementing some redundancy such as a RAID 5 server. We're also changing over from 10 Base T to 100 Base T.
Q: What advice can you give your peers?
Greg: Seriously consider NT for your business solution; you might be pleasantly surprised!
John: When you buy components, make sure that they're NT compatible.
