Novell To Ship Single Sign-On Software

The challenge of managing passwords for multipleapplications running on a Novell network should become easier this week when the networking vendor starts shipping new sign-on software. Novell Single Sign-On runs on a NetWare 5 server and stores user passwords for applications from Attachmate, Entrust Technologies, Lotus Development, PeopleSoft, and Wall Data. Support for SAP applications, NT Domain services, and mainframe access is expected in a future release.

The Novell software, when combined with Novell Directory Services version 8's existing ability to store passwords for multiple operating systems, provides a single point of authentication for a variety of messaging, enterprise resource planning, and host emulation applications running on Windows NT, NetWare, Solaris, and other platforms.

"Single sign-on is nirvana from an IT perspective," says Todd Chipman, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "It's been something that has eluded IT departments without a lot of customization work."

Providing users with a single point of authentication not only can increase their productivity, it can significantly reduce help-desk calls. Still, analysts say Novell Single Sign-On software requires the use of the vendor's network operating system and directories software. "If you don't have the latest versions of NetWare and NDS," says Neil MacDonald, VP and research director at Gartner Group, "running this is not very appealing."