CENTERFOLD

Doubleday Doesn't Judge A Network By Its Cover

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People find it hard to resist joining book and music clubs when companies like Doubleday Direct offer several CDs for only a penny or books for a dollar. How can Doubleday Direct provide such offers and continue to attract new clients? It does so by maintaining an updated company network and designing attractive and comprehensive brochures through the use of that system.

The music and book club company maintains a network with built-in redundancy so that a breakdown will not cause downtime for its operations. "We try to meet the users' needs while controlling the costs associated with that task," says Sol Domanico, Doubleday Direct's manager of network services. The company finds equipment at the best price.

More t han 500 employees at the company's corporate headquarters in Garden City, N.Y., and its two external sites access the Novell NetWare 4.1 network. The network runs over high-speed 3Com Corp. LANplex 6012 and 2500 switches and 24-port LinkBuilder FMS II hubs, according to Domanico. This equipment "keeps the network operational, highly redundant and scalable for future needs," he explains.

The FDDI backbone provides a high-speed backup for redundancy in case one link breaks down. Approximately 23 people are on each shared Ethernet segment attached to a switch port. "Traffic and the flow of information are a lot smoother by this method," Domanico says.

Doubleday Direct's creative services department designs the company's many brochures listing the available products by using the applications available on the network and through the Internet. The staff relies on the network for multimedia, storage, e-mail and file sharing.

The company uses Lotus Notes 4.1 as its e-mail application. Employees depend on e-mail for document sharing, scheduling and communication. Doubleday Direct also communi cates with publishers via Internet e-mail rather as well as the telephone. "E-mail provides the hard copy of that communication," Domanico explains.

Domanico says his greatest challenge lies with managing a robust and expandable network while keeping costs and downtime under control and meeting managers expectations. "We investigate all [network and application] alternatives and new products through sources such as the Internet, and come back to the users with the best solutions," he says. "You don't design something that you'll throw out in a few months."

The network services staff encourages employees to know as much as they can about the network. "If we can teach the users and not have them come back to us [for solutions], that would allow time for future development," Domanico says.

A Web site is under development for future commerce. Employees use Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator to access the Internet and internal Web server (running on a Compaq Computer Corp. Deskpro 590 PC) to ob tain access to the helpdesk, employee manuals and benefits information.