So what’s the verdict on Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT 5.0 from those brave enough to try out the alpha release (the thing won’t arrive before mid-1998)? It adds the Active Directory to ease the limitations of the Domain directory and is intended to deliver a true enterprise database with centralised management, Java support and cacheing capabilities and Computerworld finds praise for the thing’s ease of use and straightforward set-up. The facility to define users by their roles in the organisation, and the Real World User Manager Utility that enables administrators to establish guest user accounts and assign that person to a specific group were praised, as were the Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support; on the downside, the synchronisation and replication feature that controls server operations doesn’t work properly so users on a Windows NT 5.0 network could be denied access to key resources and find themselves unable to communicate with other users – but what do you expect in what is an alpha release?
