In the news publishing business, keeping the corporate network running efficiently is one of the highest priorities. As the systems support manager for The News Journal, a Gannett Co., daily newspaper in Delaware, Jose Alvarez understands well the value of efficiency. He is responsible for supporting the company’s 300 Windows 95 and Macintosh 7.0 users on Windows NT, which was recently chosen as the corporate networking standard. The stakes are high in this time-critical business—The News Journal employees must be able to work effectively on the network, or their 125,000 newspaper subscribers might be affected. The News Journal is published by Gannett Co., Inc. one of the largest diversified news and information companies in the U.S. and publisher of USA Today and other leading newspapers.

With the migration to Windows NT, Mr. Alvarez and his staff realized immediately that user administration would be a problem. “Windows NT gave us two options, we could either assign users full administrative control or none. Initially, we limited user rights to maintain security. Unfortunately, the support ramifications were tremendous—each time a user wanted to change their password, they called the support staff. Support calls from users skyrocketed to 15 calls per day. Half of my day was consumed by minor administration requests and I wasn’t able to address the real user problems,” said Mr. Alvarez. At one point, The News Journal support staff even granted some users full administrator rights temporarily, then changed the administrator password the next day. This jeopardized network security and was clearly not an optimal solution.

Gannett Co. needed to quickly find a solution that would allow them to take full advantage of Windows NT but would reduce the support burden on their staff. The News Journal support group installed Trusted Enterprise Manager (TEM) from Master Design and Development on the company’s six Windows NT servers and set up four main groups of administrative rights. By extending Windows NT’s native “all or nothing” administration, TEM allowed The News Journal to securely distribute rights to network users. “TEM paid for itself the first day. TEM immediately eliminated trivial support calls, reducing them from 15 to a couple per day. With TEM installed in our Windows NT network, our support staff is much more effective—now we can provide the proactive support services our customers require instead of reacting to minor issues.”