Novell Inc is handing over all responsibility for NetWare for Macintosh and Novell client for Mac OS to a third party. Under an exclusive agreement with Prosoft Engineering Inc all current and future development, distribution and support of Netware for Mac will be carried out by the California-based Macintosh software development firm. The news was intended to coincide with the opening, on Tuesday, of this year’s Macworld Expo show in New York (CI No 3,448). At the show, Apple’s interim CEO, Steve Jobs, said his company planned to take the consumer market by storm with its new iMac desktop product. And Prosoft, a long-time Apple software developer, wants to position itself just in time to get a piece of the action. Ken Freeman, Prosoft’s product marketing manager said of the iMac: It’s a beautiful computer. Apple wants to push the iMac in the consumer space, and that includes education. Novell already has a massive installed base in the education sector and we fully intend to support the iMac when it’s released next month. Freeman said Prosoft would continue to make products in the same two categories as Novell. NetWare for Macintosh is designed for an Intel-based server and enables the operating system to talk to Mac clients, including iMacs, using the Appleshare protocol. Freeman said Prosoft would introduce its own, new version of the software some time during late fall this year. He said the priority would be to make sure the software supports NetWare 5, the new version of Novell’s network operating system due this summer, as tightly as possible. The second product line, Novell client for Mac OS, will be updated to beta version 5.12 for late summer, Freeman said. The software resides on the Mac client and enables it to communicate with a NetWare server using Novell’s IPX protocol. Version 5.12 will be optimized to work with Apple’s latest operating system, version 8.1 and Freeman added that Prosoft intends to launch a new release of the client software, version 5.2, later in the fall. He said the software would offer tighter integration with the Mac OS, alongside increased performance. It will also incorporate customer-generated ideas, Freeman said, including improvements to the interface, speed and reliability. The ultimate aim, Freeman concluded, is to make the Macintosh desktop a true IP client on the network, rather than communicating in IPX. He said Prosoft hopes to have achieved its goal by early summer 1999. And an IP NetWare for Macintosh server product is expected around the same time. Brian Faustyn, product line manager for NetWare 5, said Novell decided to outsource its Mac development to Prosoft because it had much better expertise in house to take these products into the future. We’re doing this to satisfy our customer base, he said, Because they are continuing to purchase and deploy Macs on a large scale. He added that Novell would continue to share all its knowledge, and any relevant software tools, with Prosoft. รก
