Features

And Now for the Heavy Lifting By David Joachim In our first "On Location" documentary-style company profile, we give you the inside story of Life Time Fitness, a $150-million health club operator in the process of overhauling its applications infrastructure. Online-Only: On Location with Life Time Fitness Project Timeline: Up-to-the-minute status on projected and actual milestone completion dates Life Time Forum: A safe haven to air your gripes, post thoughtful questions, and submit tips on rolling out Web Services Project Blog: Daily/Weekly status reports, pointers, and random thoughts by project leaders and Network Computing editors

MMS: The Muscle Behind the Life Time Fitness Machine By James Hutchinson Based on Sun's J2EE and Java, Life Time's Membership Management System called for forward thinking -- and risk taking -- to make things happen. It also included letting go of the company's Microsoft environment.

Life Time's Body Corporate By David Joachim In response to widespread leadership changes and a rapidly evolving IT focus, Life Time Fitness established two steering committees to make sure business and IT priorities gel. We interview key committee members.

Workshops

Workshop: Cover Your Assets, Web Style By Lori MacVittie Firewalls and demilitarized zones let you control network traffic so your users get Internet access but attackers are stymied -- in theory anyway. The rub is that your firewalls and DMZs must be set up correctly.

Buyer's Guide: The Right Kind of Fibre Channel Switches By Steven J. Schuchart Jr. Before you go shopping for fibre channel switches, a market far less mature than Ethernet, read our guide. It will help you make the right choices.

Online Only: Interactive Buyer's Guide: Fibre Channel Switches Use our features chart to compare top products from such fibre channel switch vendors as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Inrange Technologies, McData and others.

Sneak Previews

Sockeye Focuses on Managed Routing Services With GlobalRoute 2.0 By Peter Morrissey Sockeye Network designed its GlobalRoute 2.0 service to give companies with multiple Internet connections the best performance for outgoing traffic. So what makes this system stand out? It's a managed service rather than just an end-user appliance.

Languistics B-Monitor Keeps Spam and Malicious Code From Infiltrating E-Mail By Sean Doherty Because it uses natural language processing methods for e-mail filtering, B-Monitor bypasses all the hiccups associated with a keyword filtering approach.

Luminous E200: Enlightened Transport for Ethernet By Darrin Woods It's one of the first platforms based on the proposed IEEE RPR standard, which is impressive. But we found room for improvement.

StorServer S10000: Two Towers of Power for Data Backup and Recovery By Eric Fleming Setting up StorServer's backup tool for testing was a breeze, which proved to be a hint of good things to come, including solid results in the S10000's disk-to-disk-to-tape backup capabilities.

Departments

Letters "Another major reason why VPNs won't cut it is that not all devices on the network use Microsoft operating systems." --Paul Pierre, DiSYS Consulting

Quick Takes This issue, we look at these hot products: * PolyVec Solution Suite * St. Bernard iPrism * Agere Systems Orinoco Wireless LAN Manager * AppForge MobileVB

Columns

The Inside Story: More than Location, Location, Location! By James Hutchinson "Got some leading-edge stuff going on at your company? Invite Network Computing over for a visit, and we'll make you a star."

Down to Business: Feeling the Heat in Redmond By Rob Preston "Often, Microsoft's reaction to customer dissension is to reach for the stick rather than the carrot. And that's unfortunate because Linux and the growing number of applications that run on it make the competitive landscape look more inviting."

Top of the Stack: How Will We Justify VoIP? By David Willis "We have to prove VoIP will provide some concrete benefit -- above and beyond conventional voice systems. First thing we need are phone-application vendors to improve bad interface design."

BuzzCut: Agere Plays Its Hotspot Card By Dave Molta Agere's entry legitimizes the hotspot market, which is a plus for most of the customers shopping for these products. In particular, carriers enticed by transparent billing want to deal with established wireless players, a roll Agere definitely fills.

BuzzCut: AIM for Corporate Instant Messaging By Don MacVittie What if you could set up your own AIM server with a little help from the company that invented IM? AOL plans to offer a stable server for the millions of AIM clients out there, which may mean that sticking with what your users know and use makes sense.

BuzzCut: Standards Under Siege By Lori MacVittie Developers are beginning to code to and verify their sites against W3C standards, but vendors are not keeping up with standards -- or else they're not implementing them correctly.

BuzzCut: Novell Dives Into Web Services By Ron Anderson Novell is big in authentication and identity management, and by acquiring SilverStream Software, it adds a whole new dimension to its product line -- app development and hosting, plus Web services. Will customers buy into this new union?