Captain,
It could be a loooong wait. The reason I was convinced that the directory was spoken for was because Netscape pitched real hard last summer. This was followed by a trip or two to another site with the CIO and the guy they were planning to train in directory services. All were meetings with Netscape. Then I didn't hear much more (and my husband is not much for talking about what they're buying, I have to catch what comes out real fast sometimes). Mind you, the idea of a directory is still in the stage of a fancy phone book, like for example all the citizens of a county are one group, the whole state is a bigger group, and everyone knows each other's phone numbers. And anyone can look them up. Okay, maybe a little more sophisticated, but not much.
Places like this need to be shown how massive the data is that needs to be managed, how important it is to be able to assign rights to individuals and groups, the correct rights, the correct way, without infringing on civil rights or security or privacy. And if I become one of the users with some sort of rights, I want to know that if I want to access say, public domain land records or whatever, I want to know that I will be able to get in, that the system can handle the load of all of us users with questions at the same time. And not get us confused.
So it seems that it's gonna take time. In the past year or so, this place has installed more than 100 NT servers, 27 Exchange servers, maintained a small handful of Novell servers and replaced a good portion of somewhere around 4-5000 workstations (all from Dell). They desperately need caching, my dial up connection is faster than my husband's T1 line, but I think they plan to breathe a little more before commiting to a directory. But the snide comments are flying about Novell being able to hang in around.
Hey, I just bought more, figured that averaging down was what I needed to do, so I really want to see some sales. |
