NIS Introduction


	Introduction
	The Network Information System (NIS) is a safe environment for sharing data among large number of network (Internet or Intranet) users. Also, this environment provides a secure and controlled access to the shared data. The NIS is described by an example where it is customized for an editorial system of a newspaper organization.

	Traditional Newspaper Organization
	The published newspaper is the net of the integrated accumulative work of a group of people. These include: editors, reporters, desktop publishers, photographers, and graphics designers. The main source of raw news for the newspaper is the News service and the Picture service. Other sources of news can be from reporters or typists. Editors of the newspaper collect the raw news information from the incoming news sources and prepare the editorial material to be published. Graphics Designers may edit or sketch images for the newspaper. Desktop Publishers deal with managing the layout of the newspaper. Editors, graphics designers, desktop publisher, and others share and work on the same data items. In the traditional systems, all the transactions of data among the involved people are done using hard copies. In other words, the data is delivered manually by hand from one person to the other. In a large newspaper organization, people might be working in different places or even in different floors. This means, following the traditional model of hard copies for large organizations will be inefficient and will result in waste of time and resources.

	NIS Enhancements
	NIS provides a network-based (Internet or Intranet) mechanism for data transaction, management, and storage. NIS is installed on a web server that can be accessed from the network it is connected to. The advantage of this approach is that it will provide a fast medium for exchanging information and speeding up its work; it manages data grouping and accessing according to the rules of the NIS that are designed to be user friendly; and it eliminates the need for preparing hard copies whenever there is something to be showed to other parties in the system saves resources. NIS divides the work process of the organization into a set of sub-processes. Each sub-process has its own allocated data and involved people. A process may share a sub-process, in a read only mode (a process can use the shared sub-process's data, but can not change it or add to it). In the same way, people might be involved with more than one sub-process. Data security is provided by a simple and effective privilege assigned to data and to every NIS user.

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