The program committee got together and worked out a group of common themes that seemed to weave their way through the tapestry of the workshop. Leitmotifs, if you will.

• NT is far too complicated and is far more complicated than UNIX
• Most people were facing rapid deployment issues. Management has to have NT everywhere RIGHT NOW!!!
• There really are no decent tools to manage very large NT installations. Companies with the resources (like our friends at Lehman) are building their own. Others will have to suffer with SMS.
• The guts of NT are poorly understood by most people.
• NT is perceived by management as ‘easy’ compared to UNIX. I mean hey, these are just PCs, what could be so hard? Therefore existing support staffs are expected to manage NT in addition to all the other things they don’t have time for (like rewriting the automount maps, installing new versions of DNS, etc.). And most UNIX folks aren’t trained in the internal horrors that comprise NT networking. So unless you’re willing to gut the authentication system and use NISgina, you’ve got to work within the NT networking model.

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