But what if we want to test employee portals? Say we're especially interested in seeing how well they work with a company's legacy data, HR and CRM (customer relationship management) applications and accounting software. That would mean that in addition to the installation and configuration work required for the portal applications, the reviewer would need to generate legacy data, install and configure HR, CRM and accounting software, and tie all the systems together for the review. That would make for a great review, but it would also be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.
But what if the legacy data were already online and available, gathered as part of the ongoing operation of NWC Inc.? What if the HR, CRM and accounting applications were already installed and running simulated transactions 24x7? Furthermore, what if these systems weren't subject to the normal rip-and-replace process inherent in testing labs? Then we'd be able to do the portal review and much more--testing the vital interoperability features that are critical to your business. The switches, routers, servers, storage, operating systems and applications software installed at NWC Inc. are dedicated to the IT needs of the fictitious company. We'll treat NWC Inc.'s networks and servers as if they are production systems to ensure they're there when we need them. The applications and data will also be available to do the kind of in-depth, comprehensive reviews we need to do.
The core application infrastructure will maintain databases with financial, inventory, customer and order data. Our Microsoft Active Directory Server and Exchange implementations maintain a list of employees and access rights. The applications and data served by our infrastructure won't go away: They'll expand and change over time. When we bring in a product to review, we'll pit it against the real-world data and applications residing in the existing environment. Business-intelligence tools will need to analyze existing, real-time data. CRM applications will need to integrate with our customer and order data. HR applications will have to interoperate with our existing authentication mechanism, and Web-based products will have to play nice with our Apache/IBM WebSphere/DB2-based Web infrastructure. (For more infrastructure particulars see "Building Blocks" and "Software Focus".)
We'll use NWC Inc. to test business applications from a unique angle, looking hard at integration capabilities as well as feature sets and product life-cycle issues, such as those involved when performing critical system upgrades. How does the new software affect and interact with not only our current data but other integrated applications? If the pieces don't fit together, we'll tell you. If there are particular pitfalls to avoid, we'll let you know.
Because we've designed NWC Inc. as a company with a significant Web presence, we'll also use the new production environment to do in-depth Web services reviews and workshops. During the past year we've been saying that Web services will be an important new tool that can drop dollars to your bottom line. NWC Inc. will let us explore the strengths and weaknesses of Web services so you can make better decisions about when and how to deploy them.
We've got a number of plans for using the new lab. For example, business tools like enterprise application integration and CRM will be introduced to the NWC Inc. infrastructure this year, plus we'll run a Workshop on upgrading common business applications. Associate technology editor and storage guru Steve Schuchart plans to explore offsite backup in the context of NWC Inc., and SNMP wiz Bruce Boardman will leverage the new infrastructure to dig even deeper into the world of proactive network management. When we look at portal software, we'll test integration with NWC Inc.'s "legacy" applications.
To learn more about the day-to-day operations of NWC Inc., and the product and integration decisions we made, read on. Share the details of NWC Inc.'s physical infrastructure, including air conditioning, premises security and power, as well as our hardware implementation and the software systems. Also visit NWC Inc. online, at inc.networkcomputing.com, for a blog and a live Web cam. As we use the lab to hammer business applications, you can follow along step by step online.
Ron Anderson is Network Computing's lab director. Before joining the staff, he managed IT in various capacities at Syracuse University and for the Veteran's Administration. Write to him at randerson@nwc.com.
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