The UNIX LANs in 1500 are experiencing explosive growth. The individual departments are creating LANs to address their particular needs; however, at the same time, shared software tools between the departments are becoming more common. It is anticipated that users will occasionally need access to various department software and/or LAN services, and that support personnel may carry responsibilities which require familiarization with multiple environments. It would be beneficial to users and support personnel if the various department environments share some basic similarities, allowing somewhat transparent access. This will become more important when departments share specific systems, as 1510 and 1550 have proposed with an unclassified UNIX system. Therefore, standards/conventions on the department LANs and the central site systems have to be established to allow for these features. it should be noted that the goal of the UEC is to set standards/conventions which affect the users and provide some basic structure for software installation and maintenance; it is not the intent that all 1500 LANs be made identical at an operating system and/or hardware level. The specific areas of concern include: (1) definition of a non-OS file structure; (2) definition of an interface for remote mounted file systems; (3) definition ofmore » a user interface for public files; (4) definition of a basic user level environment; and (5) definition of documentation requirements for public files (shared software). Each of these areas is addressed in this paper.« less