Many companies have dynamic work locations and computing styles that impact system service delivery, including:
· Employees who regularly work at one or more corporate sites
· Employees who travel often and require mobile computing
· Employees who regularly work at customer sites
· Employees who work directly from their homes
DCE makes it possible to provide improved and more economical computing services for employees regardless of their location or computing style because each employee will be a member of a cell in a distributed computing environment.
A cell is a group of machines and users that work together as a single administrative unit and that are bounded by a unified security database and namespace. A distributed computing environment is a cell or group of cells that can communicate with each other. A cell becomes a member of a distributed computing environment when it registers with a global directory service in which other cells in the environment are registered.
A distributed computing environment is superior to other system infrastructures because:
· It provides faster and more reliable services to users because of globally named objects and planned server redundancy.
· It is more economical and easier to manage because cell administrators focus on managing the services instead of the underlying hardware, software, and networks.
· It provides reliable core services and standard application programming interfaces (APIs) to facilitate application development and maintenance, allowing developers to focus on the application's functionality instead of platform dependencies.