December 20/27, 1999

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1999 Product Of The Year
Novell Directory Services 8

By Logan Harbaugh

Products Of The Year:

Broadvision One-To-One CacheFlow's Web-Caching System Red Hat Linux 6.1 Novell Directory Services 8 Oracle8i Network-Based Procurement Services i2 Technologies' Rhythm Siebel 99 Four-Way Enterprise Servers Extensible Markup Language Hardware Renaissance Most Important Products of the '90s

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ovell Directory Services 8 is not as visible as many other network applications released this year, but it may well be the most significant. Given the noise being made about Microsoft's Active Directory, someone new to the IT industry might conclude that it's the first directory service to be available in the LAN marketplace. In fact, NDS 8 is the third generation of Novell Directory Services, a stable and mature directory service that has been around for more than six years.

While NDS 8's main claim to fame, the demonstrated ability to handle 1 billion objects, may seem of little use to many users, it nonetheless clearly demonstrates a degree of scalability that should be able to handle even the Internet. In fact, Internet service providers and application service providers are key markets for NDS 8.

In addition to increased scalability and speed, NDS 8 also brings new features to the table, including increased flexibility in replication across wide area network links, native Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 support, and support for the Extensible Markup Language.

However, NDS 8's "old" features make it attractive to many experienced administrators. It's a proven product used in thousands of companies, supporting millions of users, with tens of thousands of trained and experienced administrators available, hundreds of applications already in use, a well-deserved reputation for stability, scalability, and cross-platform client support, and many years of development in response to real-world use in large networks.

NDS 8 has many applications that provide widely varied functionality, from Novell's own ZENworks to a variety of third-party applications. ZENworks is a good example of the maturity of applications available for NDS. In version 2.01, the suite of network-management tools enables management of client workstations to a degree that inexperienced network managers may find hard to credit--and it supports a wide variety of clients, including DOS, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95 and 98, OS/2, Macintosh, and Linux, none of which will be possible to manage through Microsoft's own Active Directory product.

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