unlimited power at your fingertips

by Jim Yarrow

FCIS, with its integrated Internet Services module, puts an extraordinary amount of control in your hands. you can put as much as you want online, or as little as you want. you can use FCIS to publish your web page, link to databases, access the full system, if you choose to make it accessible through the internet, and collect data from customers.

www services -- FCIS contains a fully-functional www server. it includes support for such internet standards as www, cgi's including those for Windows NT and acgi's for Macintosh, shtml, including server-side includes, Java, Perl and Visual Basic.

additional internet standards which are supported by FCIS are SMTP, POP3, NNTP, FTP, Finger, LDAP and IMAP4. and as discussed in the messaging discussion, content from the web can be seamlessly linked to internal FirstClass forms. data from within the FirstClass system can be linked seamlessly through custom FirstClass forms, allowing anyone in your organization, from clerical to executive staff to write and update interactive web content without any knowledge of HTML.

another very important aspect of FCIS is its' ability to render out different content "on-the-fly". without any additional code, it can automatically render not only for "land-based" computers, but also WAP and WML devices. for example, this entire site is surfable via a wireless Palm or even a WAP-enabled phone, and we didn't rewrite one line of code or pay a nickle extra to get this functionality.

all of these capabilities are included with the FCIS server, and you don't even have to buy additional licenses! all of these services, in addition to the FCIS server can run on one or two very modest machines. when your internet needs dictate, you can move the internet services to another machine to enhance performance. the page you are reading right now is being sent from a PowerMac 7200 running at 120MHz. the PowerMac is running the internet services module. it is recieving the information from the FirstClass Server, running on a Sony Vaio Pentium I, running at 166 MHz. the server was previously hosted on a beige PowerMac G3, running at 283MHz (FirstClass Server and Internet Services). as you can see, FirstClass can run on very modest equipment.

internet services was designed from the ground up for efficiency and security. it uses memory to cache pages, meaning that it reduces the strain and overall load on the server for frequently-accessed pages. it was designed to be a secure system from the ground up. this means that many of the security holes that exist on other servers simply don't exist on an FCIS system. the only security holes to be exploited are poorly-selected passwords.

unlike Microsoft Exchange, Internet Services can run with the server without diminishing the capacity of the server. if your company grows to require it, you can put Internet Services on a separate machine, to distribute load. in fact, under FirstClass 6, you can farm internet services out to multiple external machines for ultimate distribution should your needs require it.

this is covered in the administration class, so that when others are worrying about when their pages will be hacked, you can rest assured that your server is safe and secure.

Next we will review tools for resource and time management.

Next: Advanced Time and Resource Management

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