Novell makes sound of one hand clapping

Novell made three product announcements yesterday: Novell Directory Services (NDS) for NT 2.0, GroupWise 5.5, and an integration solution for thin clients using NDS and Z.E.N works. Novell pitches NDS for NT as a way of managing heterogeneous environments of NetWare and NT, with the former controlling the latter. An NDS replica can now reside on local NT servers, so that remote offices do not need to manage NT domain trust relationships locally. Novell believes this will allow significant savings through a single point of management, without any requirement to manage domains. The beta is available for testing, and the finished product is slated for final release in Q4. GroupWise is Novell's collaboration solution, which is now shipping. It has some 13 million users according to IDC, and holds second place in the market. Although GroupWise can handle mixed NetWare and NT platforms with Mac or PC clients, support for Unix clients and servers is not yet available. Novell has finally developed a directory-based approach to managing thin clients by means of a collaboration with Citrix. Citrix's WinFrame and MetaFrame can now integrate with NDS and Z.E.N. works (zero effort networks). Novell says that Windows applications can be run via NDS over the Internet or local network from any PC, network computer, dumb terminal or thin client that can run a browser. Z.E.N. works is also compatible with NTS 4.0. Availability is this month. ®