That’s with The WEB set up the simplest way. Even with The WEB in a more complex form, however, the procedure wouldn’t be much harder.
On the other hand, The WEB isn’t the system for you if you’re hoping just to press one or two buttons to send information on its way.
What Special Features Do You Need?
Ask, ask, ask the sales reps about what’s available.
Remember, some networks won’t let you share printers or modems or even send files to another computer. Also, will printing take longer to set up remotely than with all the equipment by your side? How easy is it?
Also, does the network have queuing? If user A and user B both send out files to be printed on the same machine, will a disk hold user B’s file until A is done? If there’s queuing, have you given up something in return?
Find out, too, if the network is interrupt driven? Let’s say someone’s getting information off one of your computer’s disks while you’re typing. Where should your computer concentrate its processing power? On the network? Or on your screen and keyboard? Better make it the screen and keyboard, since you want your machine to record all the keystrokes you’re putting in. And on an interrupt-driven system, this can happen. So there’s less chance of “Now is the time for all good men to ...” coming out as “Nwi thetme fr all good mn....”
Is error checking in use? Will the computers ask if the others received the signal okay? Will they start again if they didn’t?
Also, what about machine A using its software to work with the contents of machine B’s disks?
And can you use your pet word-processing software to print an electronic file on someone else’s printer without getting in the way of the program he’s running at the time?