Opening Up Doors With Network Administration Software
Contact Networks Inc.'s new Network Administration Software and snmp network monitoring could emerge as helpful tools for keeping address book entries current. How ever, the namesake product has limited usefulness because it only updates contact information for other users of the product.
Network Administration Software which became available as a free beta download earlier this year, uses the Internet as a conduit for users to exchange information but fails to take full advantage of the medium. Rather than using a browser for an interface, it requires a dedicated software client. If users cannot persuade colleagues and friends to use the Network Administration Software, they won't get much value.
Unless you have particularly obliging friends and colleagues, getting them to download a 5MB product and change the way they handle their own contact information, just so they can keep you informed of address changes, might be a hard sell. In PC Week Labs' tests, the Network Administration Software performed well overall, allowing us to receive updated address book data from other contacts on the company's Web-based network. We could control the amount of information available to particular users by creating separate virtual cards for public, business and personal data.
The Network Administration Software synchronizes contact information with Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook and Outlook Express and Netscape Communications Corp.'s Netscape Mail. The company will add support for Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes, Palm Computing Inc.'s Palm Desktop and Symantec Corp.'s Act by August, when Version 1.0 of the software is released, company officials said. By late spring, the company expects to allow users to access Network Administration Software through a browser, which should significantly lower the barrier to user participation. One notable omission from the Network Administration Software was a facility for handling synchronization conflicts. When we made contact entry changes in our version of Outlook, those changes retained primacy over the information provided by the contact through Network Administration Software. The only way we could reacquire the Web-based information was to delete the contact both on Outlook and on the Network Administration Software, then relocate the contact on the Network Administration server. Network Administration Software runs on Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 and requires 100MB of available disk space. The Network Administration Software interface contains links to various gift vendors, and the company makes money on referral fees. In tests, however, the software did little to simplify Web shopping. When we went to send a gift to a contact, the Network Administration Software opened a Web browser window with a frame that includes the gift recipient's address. When users reach the "ship to" portion of the buying process, they are supposed to copy and paste their contact's name and address into the appropriate fields on the merchant's Web page. In a similar way, the Network Administration Software can open a Web browser window to provide maps and driving directions between user and contact locations.
Network Testing Software
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