That's because, with the exception of the System Policy Editor, Microsoft "hasn't significantly enhanced the baseline Windows NT management utilities for the past two years," said David Sheridan, an instructor at TechTeach International, Inc. in Arlington, Va., which runs Windows NT training classes. System Policy Editor replaced an earlier, more unwieldy utility in Windows NT 3.51 to let administrators restrict and modify Windows NT Workstation and Windows 95 desktop configurations.

"Microsoft has left a lot of critical items off Windows NT administration, and the ones they do address are a pain to use," said Scott Rackliffe, assistant vice president of information systems at Farm Credit Financial Partners, Inc. in Agawam, Mass. For example, to discover the trustee rights of a group or a user, Rackliffe said he must go into File Manager and highlight a directory, select and call up the permissions object. He has to repeat the process for each directory. Last year, Rackliffe's biggest complaint was the dearth of tools to manage Windows NT Server domains and the file servers themselves.

One popular tool is Adkins, Texas-based Adkins Resource, Inc.'s Hyena, which shipped in March. It costs $99 for a single user license and $699 for a site license. Hyena melds several of Windows NT's basic management functions into a browser interface and lets administrators manage user accounts, servers and workstations on the network.

Competitors include Computer Associates International, Inc.'s Cheyenne division in Roslyn, N.Y., which sells the ArcServe backup software, and CA itself, in Islandia, N.Y., which offers Unicenter for NT, an integrated scheduling, security and backup package. Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., sells LANDesk, a set of administration tools for Windows NT.

Peter Tagatac, a Windows NT engineer at Merrill Lynch & Co., a brokerage firm in New York, said Hyena was "invaluable" and saves him hundreds of configuration and setup hours each month. He said he no longer opens up multiple, separate utilities to perform routine functions such as tracking active sessions and creating shares to make directories accessible to all users on the network.

Later this year, Microsoft Corp. will buttress its own management capabilities when it ships the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), an add-on package that will provide users with a unified mechanism to manage the Windows NT Servers and services. "Microsoft's MMC will unify many of the bits and pieces of the operating systems. But it's eventual, not immediate," said David Strom, president of a consulting and testing firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

MMC will ship with Microsoft's Internet Information Server 4.0 in the third quarter and eventually will ship with every Windows NT-based product.