InformationWeek

December 14, 1998

Most Important Products Of 98

Most Important Products Of 98:

Enterprise Application Integration Software

Teamware

Enterprise JavaBeans

SQL Server 7.0

Network-Attached Storage

Application Servers

NetWare 5

Customer-Management Applications

Midmarket ERP

Transaction Management

Runners-Up

NetWare 5
NetWare 5, released in September, is Novell's renovated network operating system, with many much-needed changes and tweaks.

Among the most important features of NetWare 5 is the support for pure IP. Novell provides a variety of options for the coexistence of IP and IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange), Novell's proprietary networking protocol, thus easing the lives of the many NetWare users who still need to continue to use applications generating IPX traffic. Most customers say that IP support was overdue, and praise Novell for finally stepping into the present.

"The move to pure IP is something Novell should have done a long time ago," says John Pawluk, supervisor of distributed technology services at a large Midwestern agribusiness company. "One of the biggest benefits of NetWare 5 is the pure IP support. We have to support several international locations where communications bandwidth isn't cheap. We don't need the overhead of IPX on those pipes."

But introducing IP isn't the only modernization Novell undertook in NetWare. This version contains a completely rewritten kernel, a 64-bit storage subsystem, and several enhancements geared toward making NetWare a better platform for applications--such as virtual memory and improved garbage collection. It incorporates Netscape's Web server and has extensive support for building Java applets, including a Java virtual machine.

Initial reaction from Novell's customers is positive, though some kinks need to be worked out before the product becomes widely deployed. A recent Gartner Group Inc. report warned that, because of some incompatibilities that exist between directories in NetWare 4.11 and NetWare 5, users should wait until the first service pack for NetWare 5 is available before they deploy the operating system upgrade.

Still, that gives Novell's solid product a long head start over Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server.

--Monua Janah

next product: Customer-Management Applications