New directory directions
Novell to show NDS for NT; Oracle has distributed plan
By Lisa Wirthman and Michael Moeller
Networking
Novell Inc.'s struggle to maintain a competitive advantage in the directory services arena may be opening the door for new directory players--including Oracle Corp.
Within the next two months, Oracle will unveil plans to provide cross-platform directory services as one part of a major object brokering effort to be released this year, said officials from the Redwood Shores, Calif., company.
The move comes as Novell labors to deliver on its promise of synchronizing NDS (Novell Directory Services) with Windows NT by the end of the year. Novell's technology for the project, which is code-named Tabasco, has slipped to a February 1997 release, with a beta version due this year, company officials in Orem, Utah, said. That development cycle, however, is still in flux, they said.
Furthermore, Novell's NDS on NT, a native version of NDS that will actually run on top of NT servers, is not due until mid-1997, said Michael Simpson, Internet Infrastructure Division manager at Novell.
The slip for Tabasco and long lead time for NDS on NT may be costly as competitors ready comparable products.
Novell ISV NetVision Inc. will begin shipping this month its own product, called Synchronicity, to synchronize NDS and NT (see beta Sight, Page 1). Also this month, Banyan Systems Inc. will begin shipping a native version of its StreetTalk directory for NT.
"I'd kill to have a product right now that would let me manage NT with NDS," said David Schaefer, information services officer for Commerce Bancshares Inc., in St. Louis.
Novell will demonstrate Tabasco for the first time at NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta this week, officials said. Although Tabasco will follow NetVision's Synchronicity to market, it will be available for free, according to sources.
Tabasco synchronizes users and groups between NDS and NT, so that changes made in NDS are replicated to NT servers, officials said. With Tabasco, NDS will run on a NetWare server.
Porting NDS to NT will provide a common set of directory APIs to which applications can be written, Novell's Simpson said.
Novell will later upgrade NDS on NT with even tighter integration, so that NDS also can be used to manage NT security, he said.
Meanwhile, Oracle is moving ahead with its own directory services plan. The company will develop messaging, connectivity and transaction services to enable distributed application development, said Mark Jarvis, vice president of server marketing at Oracle.
Oracle's new directory services will be based on open standards and will use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol as a lowest common denominator for communicating with other directory services, Jarvis said.
Obtaining directory services is critical to distributed object technology because they provide a central framework for objects to be registered in and located, regardless of where they're stored in the network, Jarvis said.
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