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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lawrence Petkus who wrote (19164)	12/18/1997 9:54:00 AM
From: Spartex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Lawrence, Looking at Novell's web site, I find that MOAB is scheduled for release during the summer of 98, while a variety of Beta versions will be rolled out into the new year. See below....... NetWare 5 (codename Moab), Novell's next major release of NetWare, gives organizations superior management and control over their expanding heterogeneous networks. Currently in beta 1, NetWare 5 is scheduled for release in Summer '98.

To: Lawrence Petkus who wrote (19164)	12/18/1997 8:51:00 PM
From: Joe Antol	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Lawrence: Re: MOAB (everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask <g>) Good reviews, but still the "nagging" ... well you know "nagging toothache". See how this reads to you <<<<<<<<<<<< Novell polishes crown jewel Gives IntranetWare the resources to compete where there was once little competition By Michael Surkan, PC Week Labs 12.17.97 The first beta release last week of Novell Inc.'s next-generation IntranetWare signals the company's renewed commitment to its flagship product. Despite diversions down paths unknown in the early '90s, IntranetWare (previously NetWare) remains the jewel in Novell's crown, the product that maintains the company's presence on corporate networks. Where other strategies have failed--from super NOSes and desktop operating systems to word processing--IntranetWare has been the one constant in Novell's strategic interests. PC Week Labs' tests of the IntranetWare upgrade, code-named Moab, show that now--at last--the product is being given the attention and development resources it deserves. Unfortunately, it's coming rather late in the game, and as the planned improvements to the next IntranetWare release demonstrate, Novell is playing catch-up in many technological areas it should have mastered years ago. Luckily for Novell, however, its competitors have been slow to pick up on the key IntranetWare hierarchical directory service technology that has become the benchmark for network management. With its NDS (Novell Directory Services), Novell has pioneered efforts in industrial-strength directory services, giving it a significant jump on a technology that its competitors are only now starting to learn and implement. Novell has introduced a bevy of products that leverage the simplified management benefits of NDS. For example, Novell's BorderManager may be just another proxy server (albeit a good one), but its ability to tie into NDS endows it with an altogether more useful character. In addition, Novell recently has been moving NDS to run natively on a number of operating systems--if the client/server developers won't come to IntranetWare for NDS, then NDS will come to them. The relative advantage of NDS will slowly be eroded, however, as major competitors start to implement their own directories, such as the Active Directory in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT 5.0 beta. And the rapid growth in the LDAP interoperability standard may mitigate Novell's attempts to encourage developers to tie their applications to proprietary Novell technology. Novell's recent decision to support Microsoft's high-level client-side ADSI (Active Directory Services Interface) is an about-face policy decision that demonstrates the difficulties that vendors have faced trying to convince developers to use NDS. Although IntranetWare has failed to catch the wave of client/server investments throughout the '90s, Novell is now doing its best to regain lost ground by skipping client/server altogether and appealing to intranet development needs with Java. However, it remains to be seen whether the nagging client/server development problems with IntranetWare will continue to hobble the NOS' strength as an intranet Java platform. The IntranetWare Java Virtual Machine, for example, is at a serious disadvantage compared with Unix and NT due to its lack of multithreading, which would let it take advantage of multiple processors. More important, if IntranetWare doesn't attract more of the back-end client/server applications such as SAP AG's R/3 (where it is noticeably lacking), it may find itself continually squeezed to the edges of networks. If IS departments need to purchase Sun Microsystems Inc. Unix servers to run their database systems, for example, they are more inclined to run their Java middleware applications on the same Unix machines. The Moab beta solidly attacks many of the problems that have kept IntranetWare on the sidelines, providing Ring 3 application memory protection (previous versions of IntranetWare implemented a difficult-to-use memory protection scheme that few developers bothered to use) and a simplified development environment with a single kernel that supports both single- and multiple-processor servers. However, Novell still has a long way to go to introduce rich C development libraries and tools. Few third-party compiler vendors (including Microsoft and Borland International Inc.) offer much help to IntranetWare NLM programmers. Moab: The beta that came in from the code Novell Inc.'s Moab is a curious hybrid in the realm of prerelease products. PC Week Labs has run across beta products that seemed chock-full of alpha code, but Novell freely admits that this IntranetWare prerelease version is composed of both alpha and beta code. The disclaimer notice burned into each CD stressed a beta emphasis on the core server and client software and an alpha designation for experimental code. In tests of Moab, most of the code--alpha and beta--was functional. Following is a breakdown of where the code stands in this release of Moab. BETA-QUALITY CODE Server operating system Client support (Windows 95, Windows NT and DOS/Windows 3.1x) CLIB and cross-platform developer libraries Novell Distributed Print Services NetBasic support ALPHA-QUALITY CODE Java-based DHCP/DNS servers and management utilities Service Location Protocol Novell storage services ADSI provider for NDS developer support Updated server management utilities Updated NDS management utilities HTML documentation AVAILABLE IN THE NEXT BETA Catalog services WAN traffic manager <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Regards, Joe...

To: Lawrence Petkus who wrote (19164)	12/19/1997 1:07:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello Lawrence, > Can somebody help me out? I could have sworn Schmidt intially said > that MOAB was going to be released by the first of the year and > that product wasn't going to be delayed. Then I could have > sworn someone at the exec suite said Moab was going to be released > in the 1st quater of 1998. Today, The DJNews Retrieval service has > an article that quotes Schmidt talking about MOAB, but the article > states it will be out in June. Software is an interesting business. In all of the software companies that I have worked for, getting a product out the door is a difficult, sometimes painful, process. If you look a the current situation, Moab Beta 1 has shipped. We are getting ready for Beta 2. As each Beta version goes out the door, we get two types of streams of input. One stream that we get is feedback from anyone that decides to give feedback on bugs, features, installation, operations, etc. The second stream is from specific beta sites, that are probably key accounts and customers, that provide us feedback on the overall quality and useability of the product. Through this process we are able to "fine tune" the development effort, reprioritize features and functions, and see how the "vision" and planning works in the real world. This is where the fun begins. You might not know, but the development effort for this product has been going on over a series of years. So the initial planning occurred years ago and has been modified since then. Why modify the development plans? Well, the world of technology has changed radically ... and we have to support those changes. So as a software company, you are left with the decision of shipping a product which is complete, but might not address all the current needs ... or adjust the product during development to try and find some intersection at some future point where you address enough of the current needs, and have built a platform that can grow into the future. This is no doubt the same reason that Microsoft has slipped NT v5.0 ... it would have been delivered lacking a lot of functionality. They have to catch up. I think you will see our Betas of Moab continue to roll out on schedule (about once a month or so?) and the product will ship when it represents a solid offering ... > Am I hallucinating? Nope ... this is the software business ... > This is such a marketing information, product schedule duck soup > that it's hard to figure what's going on. Yeah ... have you been following the industry? Just think about the impacts when your product relies on the promises of three other software companies delivering on time! In my past start ups we would always try to minimize dependencies on others, but that means you write everything your self! > Are they actually setting up a smoke screen or are they just not > telling the media what is going on? Man, if customers are getting > this duck soup, they must be pretty confused to say the least. If you find out why NT slipped let me know ... and also let me know about JavaOS and NCs ... ;-) I believe this is more common that you seem to see, not that it's acceptable, but it's tought to hit moving targets that are going into new dimensions that you don't even know exist until you get there. Core customers are already involved in the Betas and are waiting on the next Beta ... > Does anyone have Slitz's e-mail address? I use GroupWise with full names, but I think the Internet address would just be jslitz@novell.com ... > Thanks > > Lawrence Scott C. Lemon