Novell Inc has made its bid for a slice of the Intranet market, by bundling a suite of its existing products in a package dubbed – no prizes for guessing this one – IntranetWare. Specifically, IntranetWare bundles the forthcoming Green River release of NetWare – including the Web Server 2.5 that comes as standard with Green River – with Netscape Navigator; the IP/IPX gateway that the company licenses from Quarterdeck Corp; and the company’s Multiprotocol Router for wide area and Internet connections. IntranetWare will ship at the same time as Green River in November. Pricing has yet to be fixed. More significantly, Novell has also been demonstrating a pilot version of its NetWare Directory Services (NDS) running on Microsoft Windows NT: getting NDS onto NT is seen as a very important plank in Novell’s Net2000 strategy of establishing it as a cross-platform de facto industry standard for directory services. As yet, Microsoft has no comparable directory services of its own for NT – these are due to ship with the Cairo release next year – and it is seen as crucial that Novell gets NDS on NT into the market before Microsoft catches up. As things stand, Novell is only saying that it hopes for a commercial release around the end of this year.
