Starting August 1 and continuing at its annual SCO Forum fest later in the month, Santa Cruz Operation Inc will begin delivering some more of those ‘Windows friendly’ strategic objectives it laid out at the beginning of the year, this time pushing more integrated Windows communications and easy-to-use distributed systems management to the fore. They are the kind of requirements being demanded by users through X/Open Co Ltd’s desktop requirements group. First Santa Cruz Operation is expanding its relationship with AT&T Global Information Solutions, swapping its current Microsoft Corp LAN Manager for Santa Cruz Operation software for the NCR Corp-developed Advanced Local Area Network Server implementation known as Pegasus. NCR has had sole responsibility for LAN Manager for Unix since Microsoft stopped supporting the environment last year. What Santa Cruz Operation will call Advanced Server for Unix is the functional equivalent of putting Windows NT Advanced Server on Santa Cruz Unix. That includes NT networking components – Santa Cruz Advanced Server for Unix sites will be able to interoperate with Windows NT and co-exist with it seamlessly on a peer-to-peer basis – plus attributes such as security and interdomain trust relationships. Pegasus offers more than the simple file and resource sharing currently available from the Santa Cruz Operation. It will provide future Chicago and Cairo desktop integration via the forthcoming Hermes Desktop Management Interface administration; distribution, licensing and management of Windows applications from a Unix server; and NetWare, Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 connectivity. Santa Cruz wants users to be able to plug Windows personal computers into servers running its Unix and to have the server know that the personal computer is there, configure it, and download software such as an X server and Microsoft Mail automatically. Later in the month, at SCO Forum, the company will begin demonstrating what it says is its next-generation, easy-use Unix systems management environment.
Common Management Environment
It is based on Terminal Command Language scripting, and Santa Cruz touts the system as a complete text and visual management environment, which it hopes could eventually provide a single point of administration for both Unix and Windows. Santa Cruz Operation is currently putting the technology up to the Common Open Software Environment’s systems management group, proposing it for use in the Common Management Environment development effort which is said to be still on-going at the group. Santa Cruz Operation says the group is currently looking at how Unix Simple Network Management Protocol-based environments will be able to interoperate with Microsoft distributed management technologies and Desktop Management Taskforce Desktop Mnagement Interface protocols, whether it be via translators, interpreters or direct support. Ideally Santa Cruz would like to be able to integrate NT Advanced Server and Unix management tools in a single environment, but it realises the two will be separate for some considerable time. It is also shopping around for a microkernel to form the basis of its next-generation Unix-on-iAPX-86 operating system and promises Spec 1170 compatibility with the next release of its current generation. The company says that there will have to be more outlets and greater volumes before it even thinks about doing a PowerPC implementation.
