By Jo Maitland
Active Directory will be bundled with Windows 2000 when the OS ships next February, but the first iteration will not support either HP-Unix or Sun’s Solaris platforms, ComputerWire has learned. Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft’s partner working on porting Active Directory to other platforms including Unix and Solaris, said it received the code too late and will not meet the February deadline. Instead, it now expects to push back that deadline to the end of August.
Although Microsoft did not return our calls, the company’s mantra over the past 18 months has stressed the importance of including cross-platform, directory services inside Windows 2000. Analysts have said that if Microsoft is to be taken seriously by large corporations, its directory platform must be robust, scalable and at the very least, cross-platform.
Cisco said it has had some of the code it needs to port Active Directory to Unix and other platforms for several months, but admitted it cannot complete the job until Microsoft’s Windows 2000 code is completely debugged – something which Microsoft is currently working on. We just have to sit and wait for it, a spokesperson for Cisco said.
And Cisco isn’t the only company expressing concern. Microsoft’s key directory integration partner, Banyan Worldwide Services, is also getting anxious. Joe Biggs, director of Microsoft’s practice at Banyan said he was working with Microsoft directly but wasn’t aware of the delay in Unix and Solaris compatibility. But if Active Directory is not the answer, we will help our customers find the right one, he said. We have emerging relationships with Netscape and Novell for directory integration.
Meanwhile, rival Novell has just released the latest version of its directory product, NDS eDirectory, which runs natively on both NT and Solaris. It uses what Novell calls federation technology which it says enables companies to house data from different vendors’ directories inside NDS, and to synchronize that data across the two platforms. รก
