REDMOND, Wash., April 17, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Workout.com Inc., a leader in online graphical fitness programs and workout information for consumers and health clubs, is keeping itself in peak condition by relying on the Microsoft Windows 2000 platform. The Milpitas, Calif.-based e-business – which is rapidly becoming the Internet portal for the athletic and fitness club industry – joins the fast-growing list of companies choosing Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server for its Web hosting and development efforts.
“Workout.com is one of the growing number of e-commerce companies using Windows 2000 to exploit the power of the business Internet today,” said Tod Nielsen, vice president of the Platform Group at Microsoft. “Windows 2000 delivers the reliability and scalability that Workout.com needs to create and maintain a powerful Internet portal. And it supports fast, flexible Web development using the popular and industry-standard tools with which developers are already familiar.”
“Our team has experience in many different platforms, but we chose Windows 2000 because we knew it could meet our needs today and well into the future,” said Don Van Patten, vice president of Engineering and chief technology officer for Workout.com. “With Windows 2000 Advanced Server and the Windows DNA model, we have the flexibility to adjust capacity requirements and storage usage while maintaining an easy-to-manage, cost-effective platform.”
Manageability, Reliability Keep Workout.com a Peak Performer
Workout.com has found managing its site a relatively easy task for a small group of employees with the snap-ins provided by the Microsoft Management Console in Windows 2000. Using these snap-ins, Workout.com can easily set up a monitoring configuration to evaluate performance on an ongoing basis or log the data for later analysis. Workout.com is also using Windows 2000 Terminal Services to ease its management burden, through functionality that allows its geographically dispersed team to remotely configure, tune and reboot a Windows 2000-based server, and install software upgrades.
Workout.com experienced the reliability of Windows 2000 Server firsthand when sites throughout the Internet, including its own, were hit by “denial of service” attacks that brought many of them down. Workout.com didn’t suffer the dire results that many other sites did. For more than two hours its Web servers were bombarded to full capacity, but the Windows 2000 Server software stayed up and running. This event instilled Workout.com’s confidence in the reliability of Windows 2000.
The popularity of Workout.com continues to grow, and with Windows 2000 it has been easy to add Web servers to accommodate the increase in the business. If for some reason new servers are not needed at a particular moment, it is easy to reassign them to other tasks.
Windows 2000 Enables Rapid, Cost-Effective Development
Workout.com had 45 days to create its Web site and bring it online. It met that tight schedule by using Windows 2000.
“Facing a tough deadline, we thought hard about UNIX, Solaris and Windows NT for our operating system, and Java Server Pages for our Web platform,” Van Patten said. “But when we saw a demonstration Web site based on Windows 2000, we were blown away by what could be done in a very short time. We also recognized that Windows 2000 would be far more cost effective than other platforms – actually, about one-third the price of a solution based on UNIX, Solaris or Java.”
Windows 2000: Part of the Microsoft Windows DNA Model
Workout.com attracts users by offering online exercise and workout programs in a graphical and video format. It derives revenues from percentages on product sales. To build and maintain a powerful and scalable e-business, the company uses the Microsoft Windows DNA model. The architecture uses Windows 2000 Advanced Server for both its server and workstation requirements. Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 hosts the Workout.com database, while Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASPs) technology handles client presentation and server-side functions as well as code-sharing between site sections.
COM objects provide the interfaces between the presentation and database tiers, while the company’s developers used XML to support variable data-stream types in the presentation structure of individual exercises and workout programs.
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Visit the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com .
Visit the Workout.com Web site at http://www.workout.com/ .
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