Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy?

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To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (28874)	11/11/1999 12:22:00 AM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) of 42771

Hello Scott, Perhaps you can clear something up for me and it falls into this "discussion" we've been fanning on this thread. Novell's NDS for NT product has an elegant solution of making NDS available to the NT environment. It allows you to manage NT domains within NDS by instituting something known as "redirection". By "redirecting" security calls from Microsoft's Security Account Manager in NT, Novell was able to subsitute NDS in it's place (a very simplistic explaination for some of the readers here) without any adverse affect on security! If you recall Microsoft didn't much like NDS for NT - in fact they went as far as to put out a press release explaining that Microsoft would not support ANYONE installing NDS for NT. After some time Microsoft backed away from their non-support claims and the whole issue fell to the wayside. With the upcoming Windows2000 release, Novell had to admit that "redirection" would be dropped in favor of synchronization between NDS and Active Directory. This has been perceived as "harmful" to Novell's position in the industry press. In fact, some articles in the past few weeks have pointed to the possibility of Novell losing customers because of this. It seems that Microsoft re-engineered the process of authenticating users which by-passed the "redirection" Novell had incorporated. There has been no mention anyplace that I can find that this increases security or adds any level of benefit to the end user. In fact, one article went so far as to mention it's possible that Microsoft did this to deflate Novell's NDS for NT product. Why? Because if NDS for Windows2000 was a viable product (and I was told by a Novell SE that it HAD BEEN DEMONSTRATED TO SOME LARGE CORPORATE CLIENTS), Active Directory may have seen a "still birth" (perhaps an overstatement but in any case, it would not have been a "good" thing for MSFT). Will Microsoft make this new security sub-system (and all APIs necessary) available via their MSDN network? This is not a conspiracy theory - it's a company protecting their new product right? And you know what? In any other case, it's good business. But when you are a monopoly, it's not - unless I've totally misunderstood the anti-trust laws as explained to me. Peter J Strifas ps - is it true that NDS has performance issues that will (in it's current iteration) limit the applications in which it can be used? For instance, I've heard that NDS is not ready for a real-time transactions-based application which requires speeds in the mainframe range - for instance - financial transactions - any thoughts there?

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