The Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Technology (VUT) in the Czech town of Brno wanted to reduce the number of platforms it was using—which included Novell, UNIX, and Microsoft® Windows®—on the client stations and on the central servers controlling the network. The ideal platform would support the same, or similar, configuration of the workstations and servers and could support both the traditional office applications and the sophisticated graphical applications (including CAD and FEM) deployed for research and teaching use. VUT chose Windows 2000 to meet these requirements.
Customer Profile
Founded in 1899, the Brno University of Technology (VUT) is the third largest university in the Czech Republic, with nearly 12,000 students. The VUT has nine faculties, covering the complete spectrum of the technical sciences. The Faculty of Civil Engineering currently has 500 employees and 4,300 students. The information technologies have a long-standing tradition in the faculty. This has a disadvantage: Many existing systems don’t support new standards and technologies.
The scale of the changes that were necessary is indicated by the size of VUT's IT system: more than 10 routers administrated from a single center, one dedicated DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and DNS (Domain Name System) server, one dedicated dial-up server with eight modems, two mail servers for 500 employees and 3,000 students, two central Web servers hosting the intranet, one commerce application server, approximately 100 personal computers in the classrooms, and many file servers.
Microsoft Offers the Solution...
The faculty network is primarily built on the Fast Ethernet technology with many fiber-optic cables. It uses 100 megabits-per-second (Mbps) LAN adapters with built-in optical transceivers. Routers are built on the RAS (Remote Access Service) technology in Windows NT® and Windows 2000, which simultaneously provides packet filtering and central administration. VUT is finding that this solution is reliable, inexpensive, and is easily and quickly renewable in the case of a hardware crash. VUT also reports that the throughput of the network is very good.
The central DHCP and DNS server is also reliable and its administration is user friendly and simple. With the advent of Windows 2000, VUT quickly began testing the operating system and was highly pleased with its implementation of dynamic DNS. The faculty intranet for employees and students was implemented with utilization of the modular Microsoft ActiveX® and COM (Component Object Model) technologies.
...And Delivers the Results
The component technology in the ActiveX platform allows full decentralization of the faculty information system via Web applications. The Active Directory Object Database and CDO (Collaboration Data Object) components, and particularly directory access through the Windows 2000 Active Directory™ Service Interfaces (ADSI), are the big steps forward for database and administrative-applications programming. VUT welcomes the strong integration of directory services in Windows 2000 and began testing that feature as soon as the beta version was released.
New tools provided by Windows 2000 offer VUT distinct advances as it develops its online education capabilities. In addition to making many electronic schoolbooks, lectures, and examples available online, VUT is now enabling students to enroll and register for exams, tests, and tutorials through the Internet. VUT is also introducing knowledge testing through the intranet technologies. The Internet browser will soon be the basic tool for students' and employees' administrative tasks.
VUT is focused on limiting the human resources required to build and maintain these rapidly evolving technologies. Windows 2000 helps VUT to do just that.
Software and Services
ActiveX® technologies
Windows® 2000
Windows NT®
Server and Workstation
