Potential Users of DCE

This section gives some examples of computing environments that can profit from distributed computing capabilities. In general, any computing organization wishing to take advantage of the benefits of a distributed computing environment (data and resource sharing, extensibility, availability, interoperability) can benefit from using DCE. For example:

· An office with isolated computing resources can network the computers together and use DCE for data and resource sharing.

· An organization consisting of multiple computing sites that are already interconnected by a network can use DCE to tie together and access resources across the different sites. The different sites can be in different countries, or even on different continents.

· Any computing organization comprising, or expecting to comprise in the future, more cooperating hosts than can be easily administered manually (perhaps over a dozen nodes) can benefit greatly from the administrative support afforded by a DCE environment. For example, in DCE the database of computer users and their associated information (such as passwords) can be administered centrally, removing the need for an administrator to update information on every single node in the network each time a new user is added.

· Organizations that write distributed applications can use DCE as a platform for their software. Applications that are written on DCE can be readily ported to other software and hardware platforms that also support DCE.

· Organizations wishing to use applications that run on DCE platforms.

· Organizations that wish to participate in networked computing on a global basis. Since DCE supports standard directory services that will be used throughout the world, a site that participates in DCE will be able to plug into that worldwide directory service database, allowing it to both see and access information about other sites and organizations around the world. In turn, it will be able to add itself to the directory service, allowing itself to be seen and accessed, if desired, by other sites worldwide.

· System vendors whose customers are in any of the preceding categories.

· Organizations that would like to make a service available over the network on one system (for example, a system running a non-UNIX operating system), and have it accessible from other kinds of systems (for example, workstations running on UNIX ).