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Hi Everybody,

I'm now sitting in the press room of the largest NT Show in 
Europe and just scanned the show for all the interesting 
NT system stuff. I'm using a French Dell Inspiron laptop
that I borrowed from one of my collegues, and if you have
ever been in France you know they use the AZERTY keyboards.

That means I'm now reduced down in typing speed by q fqctor
of qbout 2, becquse qll my q's qre now replaced by the 'q'
 More over, some other letters have been swapped so
I am now in the famous 'hunt-and-peck-mode'.

Quite a bit of news here, so let's get started!

First the numbers: 160 exhibitors with booths at the show
floor, there were 25,000 people preregistered so that means
about 16 to 18,000 will actually show up over the three days.
Over 50 strategic briefings will be held by a raft of vendors,
specialists and Microsoft people.

What cool new products or versions were introduced? A lot.

Executive Software introduced their Diskeeper V5 at the show, 
we already compared that with Norton SpeedDisk but now the
third player in the field has caught up: Raxco intro'd their
PerfectDisk 2000 which claims to do it all. What does that
mean? Win95, 98, NT4, Win2K RC2, and all the datafiles, the
Master File Table, directories, Paging file and also the
meta-data that is associated with the MFT. The product does
smart placement of data they say.

I invited them to compare PD2000 with the earlier grid I
created for Diskeeper and SpeedDisk. And I would actually
like to see some one do some benchmarks to see if the claims
of both Norton and Raxco that placing data actually makes 
a difference on an NT disk or not. Raxco also launched three
other tools: IntelliSMART that scans disks and can predict
disk failure, DiskState that shows a fast analysis of your
hard drives and where you can free up space, and a tool
called SysGem Enterprise Manager that does a similar thing
to Trusted Enterprise Manager and Enterprise Administrator.
-----------------------

International Data Corp released some news that the FASTEST
GROWING segment of the tools market is data protection.
NT Sites running SQL data warehouses, transaction based apps
and content-rich websites are driving this market to an 
increase of 12 percent this year, and by 2003 it is expected
to grow 89 percent to nearly 6.7 billion worldwide for all
platforms. Data movement and replication was indicated as
the highest peak of growth. That does not surprise me if I
look at the sales of Double-Take the last 6 months.
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/dtake.htm
-----------------------

WQuinn released a very hot new piece of technology and Sunbelt
will carry this product shortly. It is called Filescreen 2000
and simply PREVENTS unwanted and/or illegal software to be
written to the hard disks in your domain. Imagine you could
specify all files ending in .wav, .avi, and .jpg and no one
would be able to save them to disk domainwide? Now you can.
You will hear more about this tool soon!
-----------------------

The people from RoboMon introduced RoboER, which allows you
to bypass the GUI and allows you to fix problems from the
next room or hundreds of miles away. Sounds useful.
http://www.heroix.com
-----------------------

Veritas announced that Microsoft chose for their Backup Exec
to protect their worldwide Information Technology Groups
data centers. That is of course a nice endorsement and is
no surprise as Backup Exec also just won the NTools E-News
1999 Target Award. Simultaneously they put out a press release
that they are in Fortune Magazine's 100 fastest growing 
companies.
-----------------------

NetIQ told the world about their new support for Lotus Domino.
The APPManager software now is able to monitor Lotus R5 and
Domino Partitioned Servers. They also support the new Exchange
2000 that was just revealed at the Microsoft Exchange Conference
in Atlanta last month.
-----------------------

Last but not least, Essential Computing launched an IP management
tool that seems relieve a real headache. IP Adressworks gives 
you total control over IP adresses and IP resoures throughout
your domain. It is point and click configuration of DNS and
DHCP servers as well as accurate tracking and reporting on 
dynamic and static IP resource usage. Subnet masks? Just drag
and drop. http://www.essential.co.uk
-----------------------

OK Folks, that is all for the moment,

Gotta get back to my booksigning ;-]

Warm Regards,

Stu Sjouwerman

(email me with feedback: [email protected])