The big announcement on the first day of the Networld+InterOp show in Las Vegas was the one from Novell Inc and Xerox Corp on their alliance to challenge Lotus Development Corp’s dominance of the document management market with Notes (CI No 2,408). The first phase of the project, expected to be available during the first half of next year, will see the companies jointly developing Document-Enabled Networking for NetWare based on technology developed by Xerox’s XSoft division and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Document-Enabled Networking will comprise middleware software residing on NetWare 4 servers, which will take the form of a set of NetWare Loadable Modules, and application software on NetWare clients. It is intended to provide consistent access to documents located anywhere on the network, including NetWare 3 servers, and will also incorporate tools for the development of client-server applications and services enabling users to find and manipulate information on the network. Among features the companies say they will include are integration of text and attribute indexing (including keywords or properties) and library services enabling application developers to incorporate capabilities such as check-in and check-out, version control, numbering and revision annotations and access control features based on the security features of NetWare 4. The two will also publish application programming interfaces to encourage the development of front-end applications and Service Provider Interfaces to aid the integration of services and document collections from different sources. Document-Enabled Networking is intended to support conversion of text into ASCII for indexing purposes, and to this end will incorporate a set of document converters sources from Scottsdale, Arizona-based Mastersoft. Marketing will be handled independently by each company.
