About The Interactive Report Card ® Viewing Java Applets Send us your feedback About The Interactive Report Card ® In the magazine, our technology editors evaluate products based on product feature categories. These categories are then assigned weights according to our editor's judgement about the importance of each category. These report cards serve as a tool to you in making your own product evaluations. Enter the Interactive Report Card ®! We understand that every network environment is different, and so are the feature categories that are important to you. So we've given you the ability to tailor the category weights based on what features are important to you. To launch an Interactive Report Card ®, click on the icon (The program components take a few moments to load). After launching, you can change the category weight fields based on how important each particular category is to you. You can change the weights in the text boxes, or drag the slider bars to change the weights. Once you've re-weighted the features, click "Recalc" on the button bar. All of the tested products will be regraded based on your weights, and our editor's scores, and re-ordered based on their new rank. In addition, the feature categories will also be re-ordered based on your new weights. The Interactive Report Card ® runs in either of two modes. The default mode, relative, recalculates the scores based upon the relative weights of the feature categories. In absolute mode, each of the feature category weights are treated as a percentage. The total percentage is shown at the bottom of the weight column. In absolute mode, weights must total 100% before recalculating. If you want to see the editor's original choices again, just click the "Reset" button. The weights and totals will return to their defaults. We provide additional information about each of the companies/products we review. Just hold the mouse over a specific company/product, and the information will show up in the lower left hand portion of the applet. If you click on the company/product, a new browser window will pop up, taking you directly to the vendor's site. Look for new Interactive Report Card ®s coming up in Network Computing Online. Viewing Java Applets To view our Interactive Report Card ®, you must be using a Java-enabled Web browser. We've tested this applet successfully with Netscape 3.0 and 4.0 for Macintosh and Windows, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0 for Macintosh and Windows. Performance of Java applications can be slow in general, particularly on older machines. Send Us Your Feedback We're interested in your opinions about our Interactive Report Card ®, whether it's a suggestion for improvement, a bug report, or your experience getting the applet to run (or not!) with a particular browser. Please e-mail our Webmaster with your thoughts.