In its time, Wildcat was one of the very best BBS products available, but it has become long in the tooth. Santronics purchased WINS from Mustang Software late last year and appears to have done little to make the product its own. Throughout the software and documentation there are references to Mustang's name, phone numbers and Web site. Moreover, Santronics has done little to modernize the product, which came out in 1996 and was antique by market standards at the time it was acquired by Santronics. While WINS does have conferences, newsgroup support, proprietary and Internet e-mail, and a Web interface that all work well, we found the product to be overly complex, clumsy in certain areas and a poor value.
WINS have special client applications.
Both let you access their server applications from a Web browser. The FCIS client is easy to install. When you run the client, you are presented with a logon dialog that is a little more complex than we'd like to see for a general user environment. The dialog lets you choose a settings file in which a set of logon parameters is stored. The logon parameters include the server you want to log on to as well as the user name, and optionally, the associated password, which is masked for security.