Cisco and Novell are to announce an agreement that will see both companies making their products broadly compatible by integrating Netware Directory Services (NDS) with Cisco's hardware, according to sources quoted in the New York Times. However, the agreement doesn't bring the two companies as close together as many pundits had anticipated. Cisco will not be licensing NDS as it has done with Microsoft's Active Directory, and the router specialist will continue to develop its Networking Services for Active Directory, a set of software products based on Microsft's directory system set to ship with Windows 2000. Still, the deal does put NDS on a par with Active Directory as far as Cisco hardware support goes. And Novell has been granted access to Cisco-specific components of the Directory Enabled Networking (DEN) spec. That will allow NDS to manage DEN-enabled Cisco kit. Cisco and Novell are also believed to have agreed to co-operate on new technology to allow NDS to store networking hardware configurations and automatically send those settings to any device on the network. ®