Novell Inc claims it is 18 months ahead of Microsoft Corp and believes it will be the directory of choice for NT users. The company is focusing around NT and is anticipating major growth in this area as a result. Novell product marketing manager for Europe, Middle East and Asia, David Blackman says Novell is ahead of its time, but stresses: We’ve been through a lot of pain to get where we are with the directory today. Novell Directory Services 5.0 is currently in beta testing, and Novell has received 50,000 requests for the beta version, the second round of which has just started shipping (CI No 3,336). Novell anticipates it will be able to grab a substantial amount of NT users before Microsoft can get its own offering to market. Out of the 79 million Netware users, 33 million are using NDS, and the company believes it can boost that figure when NT 5.0 becomes available. Blackman says at the moment there isn’t any real competition, but adds: people don’t know they need it yet. At the beginning of the year, Novell was faced with the threat of Microsoft withdrawing its technical support for NDS on NT 4.0, and the forthcoming NT 5.0 (CI No 3,329), but the software giant later backed down and just withdrew support for security on NT running NDS, forcing Novell to handle it instead (CI No 3,331). Novell is busy at the moment with its Millennium Campaign, an initiative designed to ensure that all Netware customers have Year 2000 compliant versions. Novell is implementing the scheme via a mailing campaign. All Netware 3.0 users will have to upgrade to at least version 3.2, and 3.2 users can download the next version up free from the company’s Web site. Netware 5.0 will be the first implementation of the product to use Java, enabling users to access a common Java interface. Blackman said: We have got a lot of eggs in the Java basket. We are not putting them all in there, but the company sees it as having a very bright future.
