Another product Late! <ug!>......Too Little Too Late????
Novell Tool Eases Migration Pain
(03/27/97; 4:00 p.m. EST)
By Clare Haney, TechWire
SALT LAKE CITY -- NetWare users with migration in mind will get a tool to help them do it -- but not for several months.
Novell is planning to release a simplified migration tool by the end of the year to encourage entrenched NetWare 3.x users to move to IntranetWare, the latest version of the company's network operating system.
An early beta release of the tool, code-named "New Migration," was demonstrated at Novell's BrainShare developers conference here this week. Users were interested in the software, but said a year-end release was too far off.
At the moment, NetWare 3.x users wanting to migrate to IntranetWare have to use a combination of two tools -- DSMigrate and File Migration -- which ship along with IntranetWare to get the job done. Novell co-developed DSMigrate with Preferred Systems, which was then bought out by backup software specialist Cheyenne, now part of Computer Associates.
Novell, Orem, Utah, wants to decrease the number of steps users have to go through in migrating to IntranetWare, said Lee Lowry, Novell's software engineer. The idea behind New Migration is to create a tool using the latest graphical user interfaces, wizards and extensible architectures, which Novell can continue to build on over the next few years, he said.
In time, New Migration will be extended to offer migration from other operating systems such as IBM's OS/2, SunSoft's Solaris and Banyan Systems' Vines to IntranetWare, said Bruce Cutler, Novell's senior software engineer for NetWare migration products. The aim is to incorporate "a one-stop modular migration and upgrade utility" into the Command Center of the company's ManageWise LAN management software.
In the New Migration demonstration, Lowry showed how the process can be simplified by dragging and dropping objects from NetWare 3.x to IntranetWare. Migration projects are stored in a Microsoft Access database, which can be searched for key files.
The first release of the migration tool will include the ability to migrate passwords between OSes, together with the capability to bring all the necessary information about printers, their locations and their drivers over to IntranetWare. Lowry described both these "high-priority" areas as being already 90 percent complete.
Novell said it expects to come out in the first half of 1998 with a second release of the migration tool, which will let an administrator migrate specific files and objects. The second release will reportedly enable more specific filtering capabilities so NetWare 3.x files that don't make sense in IntranetWare can be filtered out. For example, an adminstrator would create a rule saying any NetWare 3.x user who had not logged onto the network in the past 90 days should not be migrated to IntranetWare.
The company also intends to add an audit log to record everything taking place in a migration project, so it can act as a paper trail later if needed.
Other plans for New Migration release 2.0 include the ability to restart a migration project that was suddenly halted midway because of a power outage, for example, without losing all the work.
Any NetWare 3.x user wanting to sign up to the beta program for New Migration should contact Novell product manager Rich Carlson at rjcarlson@novell.com.
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Releasing late products to market has got to end! CEO Schmidt said his goal is to focus on "a few" new products which are delivered as promised.
EKS
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