MSNBC.com

MSNBC.com, the number one news site on the Web, provides a comprehensive collection of breaking news and daily coverage on world, U.S. and local news as well as business, sports, technology, arts and culture, weather, and lifestyle topics. Launched in 1996 with a goal to embrace broadcast TV, cable and the Internet, the site style utilizes the latest interactive, video and audio Web technologies to provide depth on demand for the growing Internet news audience. On a typical day, nearly 1.5 million people come to the site for the latest news. During breaking news that traffic has jumped to nearly 2.5 million people. With that kind of audience, MSNBC.com relies on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 to provide the reliability, scalability and manageability they need to ensure the best possible customer experience.

"We have three technology priorities at MSNBC.com," says John Nicol, general manager of MSNBC.com. "First, we have to be extremely reliable, more reliable than our competition. Our second goal is to be more cost efficient than our competition. Finally, we have to be more cutting-edge than our competition. It is important to us to be at the forefront of the industry. We need to push the envelope, and Windows 2000 allows us to do that."

Reliable

MSNBC.com is updated hourly round the clock and during breaking news, the site may be updated every few minutes. "Obviously reliability is the key element for us," says Nicol. "Our customers expect MSNBC.com to be up and running 24x7, so we need a platform and environment to support that." Features such as clustering and load balancing allow MSNBC.com to support large Web sites without worrying about downtime.

Increased server availability, higher system uptime, and dynamic system configuration are just a few proof points that MSNBC.com saw with Windows 2000.

"Windows 2000 brought us increased server reliability," said Nicol. "With Windows 2000 we can focus on new and more efficient ways of getting dynamic, on-demand content to our servers for our online visitors, rather than spending time improving the server performance and reliability itself."

100 Percent Scalability Improvement

The Windows 2000 platform provides the scalability and performance MSNBC.com needs for their growing network. The Windows 2000 Active Directory^TM service and Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 allow companies to provide for more users per server.

"The switch from Windows NT® 4.0 to Windows 2000 has more than doubled our capacity—we can now service 12 percent more customers per day with a three server cluster running Windows 2000 than we could with a six server cluster running Windows NT 4.0," says Nicol. "Windows 2000 not only significantly improved the MSNBC.com customer experience, it's doubled our serving capacity without expenditure, affording the growth and headroom every site wants for its business."

Internet Enable Your Business

Windows 2000 provides a platform for MSNBC.com to build and run rich Web applications. To create and develop MSNBC.com’s dynamic Web site, they utilize many of the integrated features of Windows 2000.

"Windows 2000 provides the tools that allow us to manage the site so that we can produce dynamic, cutting-edge content and deal with high stress days, like breaking news events," says Nicol. "We use Windows 2000 on both the front end and back end of our service. We also use IIS 5.0 with Active Server Pages to tie together all the COM applications we build and present them to the user, and we use XML for data presentation on our own systems."

"Windows 2000 gives us great confidence that the user experience at MSNBC.com will be positive. It is reliable. It is scalable. It’s fast," says Nicol. "I know that when someone comes to our site they will have a great experience. That’s very important for us."

For More Information

MSNBC.com is the leader in breaking news and original journalism on the Internet. A joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News, MSNBC.com delivers the best of NBC News, MSNBC Cable, CNBC and NBC Sports. Expanded news and feature reporting is provided to MSNBC.com users via strategic content partnerships with Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Ziff Davis, MSN^TM Money Central^TM, The Sporting News, Expedia.com^TM, E! Online, FEED magazine, Onocology.com and APB News. MSNBC.com has broadband content agreements with Road Runner, Sprint High Speed DSL and Excite@Home and develops daily interactive television programming for MSNBC Cable and NBC News.

Learn more about MSNBC.com at their Web site: www.msnbc.com .

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to http://www.microsoft.com/.

Microsoft Software Used

Microsoft® BackOffice® Server
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition
Microsoft SQL Server^TM 7.0
Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services 5.0 and Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0