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

To: EPS who wrote (25244)	1/30/1999 7:53:00 AM
From: EPS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Novell's NDS brings order to intranet chaos By John Gantz 01/18/99 In the next three years, the number of intranet users will quadruple, and the amount of information they pull to their desktops on a daily basis will grow 15-fold. The number of possible elements in a major corporate network will be in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, and the number of networks and secure applications any one intranet user has access to will be in the dozens. Application after application will need information about users and devices -- profiles, if you will -- and, unless something is done, users will be ordering larger monitors just to keep all the Post-it notes with their user names and passwords on them. Actually, something can be done: Use Novell Directory Services (NDS), a modern directory services database. Two years ago, when I first started talking to IT audiences about the coming need for some scheme for implanting order in the chaos of user names, access privileges, device locators and passwords that I saw developing, I was greeted with a polite yawn from anybody higher up in the IT food chain than a network administrator. Today it's practically the same -- except the financial advantages of using a good directory are becoming clearer. And NDS has a level of stability that should put even the faintest IT heart to rest. To prepare for a presentation I'm making this week at a Novell business conference, I did something industry gurus don't usually do -- I talked to someone who actually knows something about the theories I was about to expound on to the crowd: International Data Corp.'s IT administrator, Mark Hall. I discovered that my own company, unbeknownst to me (and I'm sure to the CEO and all the other end users' line managers), is an advanced user of NDS. We run multiple LANs, a WAN, our Internet site, an extranet and soon a Lotus Notes network under it. It runs on our Windows NT servers. We've gotten two financial benefits from NDS. First, we've been able to do away with the need for on-site administrators in a half-dozen remote offices. Second, it also cuts our general IT administration time by hours per week as we set up servers, add users, handle moves and changes and distribute software. NDS is a magical elixir. It allows point-and-click administration of multiple networks, and it runs on just about anything. Lots of major vendors support it, and as more software companies write applications that use the NDS database, managing networks of networks will get easier. Although Microsoft will make a lot of noise when its Active Directory is finally and truly available, NDS today is probably ahead of where Active Directory will be. And by then, NDS will be entrenched in major reference accounts, will have many software companies and consultants relying on it and will have evolved to the next level. I don't know if NDS alone will be enough to catapult Novell into a leadership position in the Internet economy, but I know that we're going to need advanced directory services in the Internet economy, and that NDS is the best one out there from a major vendor. computerworld.com