Novell Inc duly unveiled NetWare 4.1, UnixWare 2.0 and PerfectOffice 3.0, claiming they are but a step on the way towards the company’s notion of pervasive computing. NetWare 4.1 is shipping already, the long-awaited UnixWare 2.0 will finally ship in March and two versions of PerfectOffice 3.0 will ship at the end of the month, with a third in March. Novell expects that all the application programming interfaces necessary to make UnixWare 2.0 compliant with X/Open Co Ltd’s recently ratified Spec 1170 will be finished by the middle of the year. But Novell was surprisingly down-beat about UnixWare 2.0, which we have described before, as the de facto Unix variant: the company made few promises that UnixWare 2.0 was going to blast Solaris, HP-UX or any other variant out of the water, perhaps remembering how similar claims made for UnixWare 1.0 and 1.1 came to nothing. Rather it is talking of UnixWare 2.0 being the ‘unifying’ Unix. According to Graeme Allen, regional brand marketing manager, The market wants to move between flavours of Unix. Compliance with Spec 1170 allows portability and vendors will choose. At the moment UnixWare 2.0 will only be available on iAPX-86-based systems: it will be up to the previously-ignored OEM customers to implement it for other systems. Novell will provide finished code to vendors who can then convert it to different systems. Through the distribution channel, Novell will be attempting to shift considerable numbers of UnixWare red boxes. There is a special upgrade offer of $100 for people that buy UnixWare 1.1 before March 31; those with competing Unix products can upgrade for $400. But given that UnixWare is seen as a key part of Novell’s SuperNOS strategy and that version 3.0 is expected to be based on the microkernal, the company was surprisingly reluctant to discuss how that development is going. NetWare 4.1, the other system that will eventually be based on the SuperNOS microkernal, is Novell’s networking product for peer-to-peer networking right up to massive networks. The company says it is simpler to install than ever before, and has seven core services, distributed directory, messaging, routing, management, security, file and print, and System Fault Tolerance III mirrored-server technology as promised back in November. In an attempt to get version 3 users to upgrade, Novell has priced 4.1 the same as version 3 and now provides licences in increments of five users, rather than the big leaps that users had to pay for previously. A five-user licence costs ú730, and prices rise to ú31,820 for 1,000 users.
Network-enabled suite
Novell says it will continue to sell version 3 for the next few years but that all its efforts are being concentrated on version 4. PerfectOffice 3.0, which makes use of Novell’s big purchases of 1994, is being touted as the first truly network-enabled suite inasmuch as it can access network resources and has an intelligent view of the network. The graphical user interface is consistent between all programs in the suite but as the suite has been launched before Windows95 some aspects of this may be redundant following Windows95’s arrival. Novell says it is already working on a native Windows95 version. PerfectOffice comes in a standard package with WordPerfect 6.1, Quattro Pro 6.0, Presentations 3.0, InfoCentral 1.1, Envoy 1.0, GroupWise 4.1. The professional version has all this plus Paradox 5.0 and AppWare. The select version that will ship in March will be a customise-your-suite-yourself affair. In PerfectOffice, Novell has made full use of Object Linking & Embedding between the applications. Spreadsheet data can be dropped into word processing files which can then be edited and sent to colleagues via electronic mail. There is also a variety of quick rules and quick files making the suite fairly quick to use. Novell has managed to keep the size of the suite down by sharing code between the programs but it still requires 8Mb of RAM. Until April 30 users with any version of Novell’s business application or NetWare can upgrade to the standard
version for ú150, after that it will sell for around ú400. Novell believes these products, and the number of Unix and NetWare users that exist already, will push its idea of pervasive computing, which is basically that every computing device will eventually be linked into a network.
