You likely have a smaller simple environment then. And yes, it does
*tend* to work *fairly well* in those situations but again, still
nothing is guaranteed for the delivery. In larger or more complicated
environments it can quickly become a train wreck because it depends on
things that aren't guaranteed. I was at one point a fan of the
capability too and actually wrote tools to leverage it better and
published them, but the feedback globally was wholesale and generally
quite bad on its overall suitability for what people wanted to use it
for, getting messages across in some form of guaranteed way and lots of
people felt that it was an issue with the utilities when it is actually
an issue with the underlying protocol and principals. I.E. If something
was on fire, they really wanted to get that message, not maybe get it
and maybe get it is the absolute best you can ever say with the
transport. This isn't new experience, this is from the 90's and early
00's. It never got better from there, in fact it got considerably worse
as people's networks got more complicated.
This last comment "*it works here*" is almost certainly more properly
stated as "we feel it works here". I doubt you would know positively if
it ever failed unless you were directly involved with every single
broadcast on both ends. Likely it has failed at some point and no one
noticed or someone just thought it was weird and resent or the programs
just resent until the desired action it was alerting on was handled. At
one point I had tools that centrally monitored all messages sent and
received and there wasn't a single network that the tools ran on that
didn't have dropout of messages which was positively validated by the
centralized mechanism in the background of the app. Even on my home
network of a single subnet and 15-20 machines there were occasional
dropouts.
Honestly if this is the worst issue you have with changes in Vista, you
will be lucky. There are a lot of changes and most I think are for the
better to produce a more stable, secure, and dependable OS. Is it
perfect or unflawed, no. There isn't a perfect or unflawed OS out there.
It is unlikely there ever will be as OSes are getting more complicated
not simpler. The more complexity you add, the more chance for issues as
the number of corner and edge cases starts going up that likely aren't
fully accounted for.
joe
--
Joe Richards Microsoft MVP Windows Server Directory Services
Author of O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition
www.joeware.net
---O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition now available---
http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm
Michael said:
NET SEND isn't a very good admin communication tool. Totally best effort
delivery with no way to validate if someone received a message or not
and if they logged into multiple places no clue which place *might* have
received the message.
[snip]
Ah, Microsoft knows best, eh? If I want to use NET SEND in our
particular environment (or if Backup Exec wants to use it), that's not
possible under NT6?
I have a Group Policy (NT5.x) which makes all our clients run the
Messenger service automatically - that's the only thing I have to do. No
hunting for a suitable 3rd party solution and its implementation and
distribution - simple and *it works here*.
We have quite a few administrative tasks which notify users. That's all
down the tube? Well, not only "heaven can wait", so can Vista, too.
