Chapter 2: ISDN Helps People Work Together

Individual Access To LANS

ISDN is also opening LANs to easy, high-speed dialed access by individual users at remote sites - telecommuters at home, sales representatives on the road, engineers or researchers visiting another office. In forthcoming chapters, we'll examine several of these applications more closely - especially the phenomenal growth of work-at-home and video applications.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how individual systems can be linked to a central site is the trendsetting work being done at K&B Services, a large retail pharmacy chain headquartered in New Orleans. Dialed ISDN BRI connections are beginning to link the company's 183 stores, located throughout the Southeast, to a central data center. The connections carry prescription and pharmacy inventory and sales information from RS6000 terminals in each location.

According to Larry Douglas, the pharmacy chain's vice president of management information services, the current links are the first steps toward a major system that will carry comprehensive sales, inventory, payroll and other information from stores to the headquarters, as well as e-mail, administrative and other information from New Orleans to the stores.

K&B's thrust will ultimately link all of its in-store cash registers and other point-of-sale devices not only to the data center, but also to a number of clearing houses for health care insurance adjudication and credit-card authorization and processing - all through a single, dialed BRI connection to each location.

Other Sections Of This Chapter:

Beginning Of Chapter 2
Linking LANs Together
ISDN: Dialed LAN Connectivity
Individual Access To LANs
Extending A Backbone
Fast Efficient Worldwide File Transfers
ISDN For Network Overflow
High Speed For FAX
Graphic Arts
Prepress
Photo Retrieval
Publishing
Couriers